John Lindstrom, publisher of Gongwer News Service in Lansing, has written a clever column in which he pieces together economic statistics and forecasts and comes to this startling conclusion: A baby born this year will be an adult by the time Michigan returns to the employment level of 2000.
How can that be?
Well, as Lindstrom points out in the piece he wrote for Dome Magazine, an online publication, the state’s declining unemployment rate is due mostly to people leaving the state or leaving the workforce.
“In other words,” Lindstrom explained, “we owe our better numbers in part to people who have given up looking for work. And that is not good.”
When the Michigan economy peaked in 2000, the state had 4.7 million people working. The state subsequently lost 850,000 jobs during the ensuing decade, and we enter 2012 with a shrunken employee force of 4.2 million.
When will get back to the 4.7 million people working we had in 2000? That certainly is a question that was not addressed by Gov. Snyder in his State of the State Address on Wednesday.
Here’s Lindstrom’s observations:
“Just a few hours before Mr. Snyder spoke, George Fulton of the University of Michigan’s Research Seminar in Quantitative Economics told a gathering that he anticipated the state would not see that number (4.7 million) again until sometime after 2030.
“At first blush that doesn’t seem possible. Sure the state is down on jobs, but C’mon. Not till 2030?
“(A) … baby, born today, will be a legal adult before there are as many people working in Michigan as there were in 2000. Our baby will be able to cast a ballot in the gubernatorial election of 2030 (there will be one) before — if the economists are right — there are as many people working as in the days of our infant’s parents and grandparents.”
You can read the entire column here.
