THE GRAY-COLLAR WORKFORCE: Many seniors are staying on the job or returning to the workforce, leaving less room for younger workers and reducing their purchasing power.

“One of the reasons is young people can’t find jobs because older people are not leaving the workforce,” said Sung Won Sohn, an economist at Cal State Channel Islands who has studied the issue. Discouraged, many younger workers are staying in school longer or sitting on the sidelines until their prospects improve.

That affects business at restaurants, furniture stores and electronics outlets. And it puts a squeeze on many local governments that rely on retail sales taxes for their revenue. . . . Pew surveys suggest that people 65 and older were the most likely to be bracing for a long recovery. That helps explain why so many older workers have put off retirement.

And many seniors, thanks to the recession, now see how shaky their 401(k) retirement plans are. Without the assurance of the old corporate pension plans, they don’t know exactly how far their retirement savings will stretch.

Well, yes. Many old people aren’t retiring because they can’t afford to due to the Obama Senior Squeeze.

READER BOOK PLUG: From reader Braden Bell, The Kindling (Middle School Magic), now 99 cents on Kindle.

NOT ALL OBESITY IS CREATED EQUAL: ‘Fitness and fatness’: Not all obese people have the same prognosis.

People can be obese but metabolically healthy and fit, with no greater risk of developing or dying from cardiovascular disease or cancer than normal weight people, according to the largest study ever to have investigated this, which is published online today in the European Heart Journal. The findings show there is a subset of obese people who are metabolically healthy – they don’t suffer from conditions such as insulin resistance, diabetes and high cholesterol or blood pressure – and who have a higher level of fitness, as measured by how well the heart and lungs perform, than other obese people. Being obese does not seem to have a detrimental effect on their health, and doctors should bear this in mind when considering what, if any, interventions are required, say the researchers.

Of course, most people’s concern with obesity stems from not wanting to look at fat people, with health merely serving as an excuse for regarding the unaesthetic as somehow immoral.

HOW YOUR BRAIN DECIDES. “Understanding how the brain parcels out specific decision-making tasks can offer insight into conditions in which such networks go awry, such as in the case of psychiatric disorders. Depressed people, for example, clearly have difficulty with value-based decision making: because nothing feels good or seems appealing, all options appear equally bleak and making choices becomes impossible. Hoarding disorder, in contrast, may involve overvaluation of certain possessions and impairment of the cognitive control needed to shift one’s attention away from them. That explains why hoarding becomes more important than other life goals like maintaining relationships.”

COMPASSION: Obama’s Acceptance Speech Didn’t Mention Unemployed.

Related: The Awful, Awful August Jobs Report. With an updated version of that graphic comparing Obama’s promises with what he delivered. “If the labor force participation rate was the same as when Obama took office in January 2009, the unemployment rate would be 11.2%. If the participation rate had just stayed the same as last month, the unemployment rate would be 8.4%.”

And this graphic is, if anything, even worse:

Also: Rotten Jobs Report Ends A Bad Week For Obama. “We can surmise that Obama’s lackluster performance last night was due in part to an early look at a jobs report that not even his most dogged media shills can spin.”

JEAN KAUFMAN: Reagan’s Children: New Republican Leaders Hail from Blue States.

PEGGY NOONAN: The Democrats’ Soft Extremism: Obama is out of ideas, and Clinton’s speech was unworthy of him. Obama never actually had much in the way of ideas. People are just noticing more, now.

UPDATE: “I guess Palin was right, after all.”

Also: Losing It In Charlotte. “Lee Atwater couldn’t have written a better script for the Democrats.”

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Brown Job Growth In Swing States Makes Green Politics A Loser For Dems.

There hasn’t been all that much good news to come out of the past three years of economic “recovery,” save this: the energy revolution has led to an explosion in “brown” jobs that is driving job growth in a number of states.

The gains are particularly notable in the Rust Belt states of the Midwest, which had fallen on hard times even before the recession. In a profile of changes in commerce along the Ohio River, the New York Times digs deeper into the ways shale gas and brown energy are sparking follow-on revivals in steel production and industrial freight. . . . Given the importance of these states in the presidential election, embracing green hostility to brown energy is looking like even more of a loser for the Democrats.

Well, you could see this in the Convention talk.

MICKEY KAUS fact-checks Bill Clinton.

I THINK THEY SHOULD HAVE WAITED AND PUT HIM ON THE MOON: Neil Armstrong To Be Buried At Sea. “The arrangement resonates eerily with the plans that would have been put into effect if Armstrong and his crewmate, Buzz Aldrin, had perished during their history-making moon landing 43 years ago.”

ANDREW KLAVAN: Obamanomics 101, Understanding How the Obama Economy Works.

UPDATE: Reader Vince Watkins notes another amusing Drudgetaposition:

The extent of Matt Drudge’s artistry is underappreciated.

HEY, let’s Repeal The Hollywood Tax Cuts! And, while we’re at it, crack down on that shady “Hollywood Accounting.”

THAT’S CONVENIENT: U.S. August payrolls rise 96,000, jobless rate falls to 8.1%. Still makes 43 months above 8 percent, though . . . .

UPDATE: Workforce hits 30-year low. “That’s a new 30-year low in the civilian participation rate, lower than April’s 63.6%. That’s the reason for the decline in the jobless rate. The workforce decline artificially depresses the official unemployment rate. If we had the same level of civilian participation as we did at the beginning of the recovery in June 2009 (65.7%), we’d be looking at a jobless rate of well over 10%. The employment-population ratio dropped to 58.3% in August, not as low as last year’s 58.2%, but still bouncing along a generational bottom. That measure was 59.4% at the beginning of the recovery.”

Larry Herring on Twitter: “If Obama can get everyone out the the workforce, the unemployment rate will be 0%!!”

Also: Unemployment rises in every major market since recession. Are we really even in a “recovery?”

UPDATE: From a reader:

I am betting you heard from other finance guys already, but these numbers were bad, bad, bad. We were hoping for at least 130k, and you really need 150k just to stay even. What’s happening here is that people are leaving the jobs market. Once a worker goes off his 99 weeks of unemployment payments (I refuse to call anything beyond the 27 weeks they paid for “insurance”), he heads straight to Social Security disability. JP Morgan noted this several months ago, and the trend seems to be accelerating.

Once you’re on SSDI, you’re off the unemployment rolls. Last month, 368,000 people stopped looking for work. I am certain that we will continue to pay for those people, only they now help the unemployment number by ceasing to exist.

Top two claims are for back pain and stress. Both are difficult to disprove.

Indeed. Also, from Points and Figures:

The unemployment numbers were released this morning. They were not as good as expected. Pretty horrible actually. Some of the comments from pundits ahead of the number were interesting. Diane Swonk said, “I never thought I’d be reading political briefs to make my decisions on investing.”. She and I both. It’s a weird time.

Our labor participation rate is horrific. It almost looks to me like government employees are messing with that number in order to change the headline percentage number. Older statistics were revised down. It’s not as if we haven’t seen manipulation in other areas of the bureaucracy. We are stymied with current policy on unemployment.

This number won’t have an effect on voting booths in November. Americans know the economy is shit. What is anyone going to do about it?

The way out of our situation is growth. In order for America to resume a typical growth path, we need to create around 300K jobs per month or more. That level of job creation will drop the unemployment rate at a good clip over time.

John Galt was unavailable for comment.

BROKEN PROMISES: Obama backers lament being kept out of DNC speech. “I thought I was going to see the president, but now I’m stuck our here begging. It wasn’t how I imagined it — that’s for sure.” That’s how a lot of Obama supporters feel, I imagine.

WINNING? FROM THE NEWS COVERAGE YOU’D HARDLY KNOW WE’RE FIGHTING THERE: Are We Winning in Afghanistan? An exclusive interview with Gen. John Allen, commander of America’s forgotten war.

President Dronekiller was unavailable for comment.

PUTTING THE PARTY IN PARTY HACK: Former Treasury secretary falls into hotel pool at DNC Happy Hour.

MICHAEL BARONE: Thoughts on night three of the Democratic convention. “Barack Obama went into this convention essentially tied with Mitt Romney. Most voters want to think well of whoever is president but most voters dislike the current economy and disapprove of his economic policies. In these circumstances I thought and think he needs a pivot, an indication of what new goals he would seek in a second term. We didn’t get that at this convention.”

UPDATE: “You know it’s not a good night when you get out-shined by Joe Biden.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ouch:

1. Clint Eastwood’s remarks were more memorable and more effective than President Obama’s. The empty-chair metaphor never seemed so apt as during the Obama drone-a-thon.

2. The press, even liberal commentators, admitted that Obama had bombed. Sure, there were bitter-enders who claimed all was fine, but the cable TV talking heads and the vast majority of columnists were brutally honest. MSNBC personalities were downright glum.

3. Knowing the president has a problem with pro-Israel voters, the Obama campaign made a mess for itself by fiddling with platform language and then allowed the matter to fester for two days. The display of booing and confusion when the language was reinstated may be the most memorable thing about the 2012 Democratic National Convention. Even more surprising, Obama did not mention Jerusalem and gave short shrift to both Israel and Iran in his speech.

More at the link.

BYRON YORK: Defining hope down: Obama defends his record.

BREAKING HIS SILENCE: Eastwood says his convention appearance was ‘mission accomplished.’ “A lot of people are realizing they had the wool pulled over their eyes by Obama.”

HOPE AND CHANGE: House Democrats: Don’t Blame Us.

BYRON YORK: Romney’s message to Obama voters: He let you down.

The situation facing Romney is hard for some Republicans to comprehend. They didn’t buy Obama’s bill of goods in the first place and find it hard to sympathize with anyone who did. But there are millions of people who voted for Obama who are not only disappointed in him but have come to the conclusion that he does not deserve to be re-elected. The problem for Romney is they might still be persuaded to vote for the president. Making them comfortable with the idea of leaving Obama is Romney’s job.

Romney campaign advisers are very familiar with the type. They do polling, they do focus groups and they see the phenomenon everywhere. Says campaign pollster Neil Newhouse: “These voters are my mother-in-law. She’s a soft Republican and voted with pride for Barack Obama in terms of what it meant for the country. And now, every time she talks to me, she’s more than disappointed. She’s frustrated. She’s upset. She thought she was voting for a transformational leader and feels like we got just another politician.” You can bet Newhouse and the Romney campaign are not basing their strategy on one mother-in-law. They’re undoubtedly seeing the same thing all the time in their research.

Indeed.

SOMEWHERE, DICK CHENEY SMILES: White House circulating draft of executive order on cybersecurity.

THE DEAN SCREAM, revisited by Jennifer Granholm.

OBA-MEH: Krauthammer Pans Obama’s Speech: “He Gave One of the Emptiest Speeches I’ve Ever Heard on a National Stage.”

And “Oba-meh” was actually Ben Smith’s take.

Related: “That’s it?” “Seriously. Like an aging rock star, President Obama, in a downsized venue, with downsized proposal and spewing downsized rhetoric only reminded us how far he has fallen from the heady days of 2008. The man, the agenda and the aura are faint imitations of their 2008 incarnations. And most importantly, he put forth an agenda that was entirely, and obviously, lacking, one that didn’t begin to match the demands of our time.”

The Spinal Tap resonance continues, but without the #1 in Japan salvation. . . .

UPDATE: George W. Bush responds to Obama speech.

Plus, another Jimmy Carter parallel.