Politicians and business people look forward eagerly to the
announcement of the number of new jobs created in the United
States each month. In news stories in the Daily Camera, the
monthly number of new jobs has been in the range from 40,000 to
100,000. A couple of these stories pointed out that we have to
create approximately 125,000 new jobs each month just to take
care of population growth in the United States! To see that this
number is approximately correct we note that the population of
the United States is a little over 300 million and the current
population growth rate is a little under 1 percent per year,
which means that the population of the United States is
increasing by about 3 million people per year. We can guess that
half of these people are workers and the other half are
dependents so we have an increase of about 1.5 million workers
per year in the United States. Divide this by 12 and we get
125,000 new jobs needed each month to accommodate population
growth in the United States. So the numbe