94 million people are not in the job force....
Most of those people are retired, in school, or choose to stay at home to raise kids or care for family. Those categories also saw most of the increases.
There was also some increase in the number of people who permanently gave up after the Great Recession, but that was mostly temporary. For several months, the U3 unemployment rate ticked up because those people decided to rejoin the job market.
I.e. it is
deeply misleading to treat LFPR as though it's an unemployment rate.
By the way, LFPR started dropping in 2001, years before Obama took office.
Who's making the money - Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon. How are they helping you?
Apple makes products overseas and sells it here
Apple spends somewhere north of $15 billion on manufacturing... which is about 10-15% of their total cost of revenue. And not much of that is labor.
They also charge less for their products because they're made overseas. That's all pocket money consumers can keep, or spend elsewhere.
I also suspect that if product was moved to the US, it'd be much more heavily automated than it is in China. So we are talking about thousands of jobs, but not enough to move the needle.
Google and Facebook aggregate your data and use it to sell targeted advertising.
Where's the beef? How many US hammer swingers work in these economic powerhouses?
Apple has around 47,000 workers in the US. Which is not too shabby.
Google has 57,000 employees, most in the US.
Facebook employs 12,000 people, most in the US. They are growing significantly.
Walmart, by the way, has 2.2 million employees, who barely make above minimum wage, and many are part-time. Not exactly a huge argument in favor of US employment.
Obama had a choice to make. He could either work on the economy, or work on social justice. He chose social justice. The repairs to the economy were mostly in place when he took over, that freed his hand to create chaos in the USA and destroy our reputation in the rest of the world.
Huh?
He worked on TARP and monetary policy, he pushed through a stimulus package fairly quickly, he bailed out the auto industry early in his tenure, and so on. I'd say he pushed more economic policies in his first term than in his second.
I suppose if you work in hi tech or the government, or happen to have a great job like environmental lawyer, then yes, your little slice of the world is coming up roses. But the nation's job base has continued to disintegrate under Obama, family incomes are falling, and the invasion of illegal job seekers has become a tidal wave. As Confucius said, "A tidal wave swamps all boats".
Whatever
The nations "job base" -- by which I assume you mean manufacturing jobs -- started eroding in the 1970s, and was down to 10% of the labor market by 2009. This is due to the rise of automation, globalization, women joining the workforce -- and there is nothing any President can do to stop it. Women joined the workforce steadily from the 1970s to early 2000s, which increased the labor supply and depressed wages slightly. No one is going to roll back on women working, or ban automation. There is no policy that can change the fact that semi-skilled labor in China costs 1/10 as it does in the US. There are no tariffs we can establish to mitigate that advantage.
I.e. There is no way to turn back the clock to 1955.
There is no correlation between wages or unemployment, and rates of illegal immigration. Blaming illegal immigrants for broader structural issues with employment is weak tea.
What we
can do is improve primary education, and make it easier for people to get secondary educations (college and vocational), so we have a better trained workforce that can perform higher-skilled jobs. Obama didn't do much about the latter, but I don't see Republicans lining up to boost secondary education. I see many of them blaming other people for their own problems, while proclaiming it's only the individual's fault. Go figure.
