Why workers over 65 will stay glued to seats

A startling number of baby boomers are refusing to leave the workforce.

And that’s going to have an impact on everyone in younger generations wanting to replace them.

In fact, people over 65 are staying in the workforce at a rate not seen in more than 50 years.

Why? It’s anyone guess since the Labor Department doesn’t ask people the reason they are still working, only whether or not they are. Here are some numbers: As of the May, 19.8 percent of Americans aged 65 and over told the government they were still working. That’s a figure you get from the Labor Force Participation Rate, and it’s buried so deep in the government’s numbers that you need the help of a data archeologist to find it.

The participation rate of those older than 65 was only, for instance, 10.8 percent in the summer of 1986. And for decades, the figures stood at around those levels.

In 1960 — before the age of 401(k) retirement plans, stock market booms and such — 20 percent or more of the over-65 population was still participating in the labor force.

What could be causing people to remain in jobs longer now? I can guess. One factor might be that interest rates have been low for so long that savings aren’t generating enough income for potential retirees.

Also, people are probably healthier these days and see themselves living longer, which might make them think there is still plenty of time to putter around in the garden or play with the grandkids.

It might also be that the last recession — the Great Recession — put the fear of God into boomers, who might not think that any amount of savings is enough to tide them over until their final days.

Jobs could also be so plentiful that workers are begging people not to retire — although I doubt that’s the case.

There’s no way of knowing from the government stats whether the 65plus set are staying in the same job or getting part-time work. But no matter which reason accounts for it, if people are filling jobs longer, that leaves fewer positions for younger people just starting out or middle-aged work- ers trying to keep up their lifestyle.

If this trend continues, and it has been growing stronger since the beginning of the year, it will have a profound effect on the labor markets.

The gains in the job market in May were impressive.

But there’s something I need to point out. May is one of those months for which the Labor Department makes a guess that a large number of jobs were created by companies so new that they couldn’t be reached by Labor Department surveys.

The government doesn’t really know that these companies, or the jobs they supposedly created, actually exist. It just thinks they do.

This kind of guesswork has been going on for decades, so don’t accuse the Trump administration of manipulating the numbers — they have always been manipulated.

For instance, those 223,000 seasonally adjusted jobs that Washington said were created in May included a guess that these “newly born” companies added 215,000 jobs on a basis that’s not seasonally adjusted.

You can’t just subtract 215,000 from 223,000 to come up with a number of jobs that the government actually knows were created because the first figure is seasonally adjusted and the second is not. And the Labor Department could never tell me what the 215,000 guesstimated jobs would be if adjusted for the seasons in the same way as the other number.

So all we really know is that the guesstimate made the May figure look better than it would have been without the guesstimate. Two other things: 1) There was an even bigger guesstimate used during April (plus 260,000) and that didn’t keep that month’s number from coming in at a very disappointing level.

2) In June, the guesstimate will be less than half what it was in April and May. And that could make the job growth reported by the government less than stellar.

This is how screwed up New Jersey is.

After spending millions of taxpayers’ dollars in what was ultimately a successful lawsuit to legalize sports betting, New Jersey allowed Delaware to beat it to the punch in getting this sort of gambling up and running.

Last week, people could bet on sports at a number of Delaware locations, including Delaware Park racetrack, which is just 13 miles from the News Jersey border.

New Jersey might be next — or it might not be. Monmouth Park, a track in Oceanport, NJ, is raring to go. But it has to wait until state legislators get their act together.

You might be able to place sports bets at the track as early as Saturday. But why the hell did Trenton allow another state to get the jump on it when it was the only state that bothered to take the issue all the way up to the US Supreme Court?

Why wasn’t it ready to go the minute the favorable decision came down?

Since President Trump’s trade war is all over the news, you should know this: On Wednesday, the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis will be doing a major revision to past trade data, going back as far as 2010 in some cases. Whether this will make the already-gloomy US trade situation look even worse — or maybe better — is anyone’s guess. Nobody is paying attention to this, but the revised number could change the dialogue on this major area of contention.