During game 6 of the 2011 World Series, Joe Buck of Fox Sports kept saying:, "the Cardinals just won't go away".  He was referring to the team coming back after being down to their last strike in the 9th and 10th innings.

You have to say the same about Mr. Participation. He just won't go away either. He shows up every month and spoils the latest jobs report, as we read at IBD:

Over the past year the number of working-age Americans who have dropped from the civilian labor force has risen by 1.5 million. During Obama's presidency, the population of these Americans increased by nearly 16 million — while the labor force grew by under 3 million.

The labor force participation rate for those 16 and over dropped from 65.7% at the start of the Obama presidency to just 62.6% last month. If this rate would have remained steady, the labor force would have been nearly 14 million stronger.

There are probably complex reasons for Mr. Participation hanging around. 

My guess is that a couple of factors keep him persistent:

1) ObamaCare has a lot of employers thinking twice about hiring people full time, as The Hill reported recently:

It also happens that the ACA defines full-time work as only 30 hours per week. 

The law’s architects assumed this 30-hour work week provision would force employers to cover more employees. 

That assumption proved wrong.

The costs of providing health insurance are staggering under the ACA: Small businesses, which are the least able to handle cost increases, report paying an average of $11,868 more per employee per year since the ACA’s passage. Large companies have also seen their costs increase. As a result, some of them have cut employee hours to avoid triggering the coverage requirement altogether. The only other choices are to cut jobs or to raise prices to cover the higher costs -- an unattractive option in today’s tepid economy.

This unsettling reality is apparent everywhere you look, with countless businesses having already made similar decisions. And it’s not just limited to multinational corporations: movie theaters, grocery stores, retirement homes—they’re all having to shift employees to part-time to avoid the ACA’s steep penalties.

2) Americans are not thrilled with the state of the economy. In other words, there is a lot of fear out there. The RCP average of polls shows 28% believe the country is headed in the right direction and 61% negative. To be fair, there is more to this "direction poll" than the U.S. economy but pocketbook issues are a big factor.

How can we get rid of Mr. Participation? We can start by having someone in the Oval Office who understands how jobs are created and the wonders of a capitalist economy.
 
P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.