THE OBAMA ECONOMY – A WAR ON MEN? – AT 10:42 A.M. ET:  Sometimes the coldness of economic statistics hides the human tragedy within.  Men in the prime of their working lives are being devastated by the employment crisis under President Obama.  From the New York Post: 

Quick question: What was the most startling element of the dreary December jobs report?

If you said it was that everyone seemed to have forgotten the fact that it tends to snow around Christmas, thus skewing the data — an idea supported by the White House — you’d be wrong.

The real shocker was the continued deterioration in labor participation by those who should be in the prime of their working lives — young and middle-age males.

While the labor-force participation rate dipped to a 36-year low, the trend for middle-age males was even more worrisome.

Just 71.8 percent of working-age men have a job or are looking for work — that’s a drop of more than 1 percentage point.

Although male workers were the hardest hit by the first blows of the Great Recession, their employment prospects bounced back in 2010 and early 2011.

But then things stalled.

The Institute for Women’s Policy Research now estimates that 91 percent of women who lost their jobs in the wake of the housing bust have found new employment, while only 68 percent of US males can make the same claim.

The drop in the overall worker-participation rate, to 62.8 percent, is due solely to men, not women, dropping out of the job market.

The US numbers for men are resembling those in Spain and Italy.

COMMENT:  Barack Obama will leave this country, both domestically and in foreign policy, far weaker than when he found it.  But for his left-wing mentality, that's perfectly all right.

January 13, 2014