Darleen touched on this a bit, but here’s Jim Pethokoukis to bring it home:
It would take superspin powers to portray the March jobs report as anything other than a huge step in the wrong direction. The US economy added just 88,000 jobs last month, 95,000 in the private sector as public payrolls fell by 7,000. The official unemployment rate ticked down a tenth of a point to 7.6%.
1. That is a paltry number of jobs, more or less matching assumed labor force growth per month. So the economy must add at least that many jobs just to keep the labor market at current depressed levels. In other words, at 88,000 jobs a month the economy would never ever close the jobs gap.
2. The unemployment rate dropped because of a further decline in the labor force participation rate, now at its lowest level since 1979. If that rate were merely at March 2012 levels, the unemployment rate would have been 8.3%. At January 2009 levels, 11% (or 10.98%). While going back four years ignores demographic factors like baby boomer retirements, the aging of America doesn’t explain the entire drop. (Indeed, before the Great Recession, the Congressional Budget Office predicted 2013 labor force participation would be 65.2% (vs. 63.3% in March), assuming demographic changes.)
[…]
3. Looking at the long-term term trend, the three-month average rate of payroll growth is now 168,000 vs. 183,000 for all of 2012, and 175,000 for all of 2011. I think Barclays is about right in its analysis: “Our view is that the February employment report overstated strength in the labor market, and the March report likely overstates any weakness.” Yet the three-month average for this year is far below the first-quarter 2012 average of 262,000. Hardly a sign of strength.
4. The job market is still falling far short of predictions made by the Obama economic team back in 2009. Thanks to the $800 billion stimulus, the unemployment rate was supposed to have dropped to 5.1% by now.
— Sure. But how could they have possible foreseen that so many people — bitterclingers, most likely — would still be grasping at slim reeds of hope — and not fleeing the labor force entirely? Which seems to be the one variable for lowering the reported unemployment rate that ObamaCo Co has been able to count on.
If America were truly fair, everyone would have left the labor force and stopped bothering to look for work equally. At which point we’d have reached social nirvana: 0% unemployment, and absolute egalitarianism.
But don’t despair. We may not be there yet, but we’re certainly trending that way. For the social justice.
Forward!
Perhaps it is post failed abortion procedures that is causing the decline in the labor force. That would be a feature correct? And, how do we factor in the new citizens that are crossing our southern border at supposedly double the rate of prior to the latest amnesty buzz?
Admin, please do not interpret my second question above question as an intolerant assumption that we should somehow racistly require and assume that there should be “work” and employment opportunites for new citizens.
Those new citizens will be doing the jobs Americans don’t want to do.
When Obama took office in January of 2009, the unemployment rate for that month was 7.8%. The reading for March of 2013 was 7.6%, the lowest in his term to date. See? His policies must be working. Yay!
At this rate, we’ll have reasonable employment numbers sometime around His 10th term in office!
Surely it’s entirely appropriate when a women who knows nothing at all about firearms leads efforts to control firearms, or a woman who knows nothing about medicine like Nancy Pelosi leads efforts to control all national health-care, that a man like ObaZma, who knows nothing at all about commerce, would lead efforts to “create” jobs. And a sporting good shift he makes of it, too. Endlessly.
you can’t afford to hire stupid people when you have a limit of 24 employees what you need to be as versatile as possible
and they need to come equipped with at least 70-80% of the skills you’re looking for, cause you can’t gamble on aptitude you need to know for sure they can do the job
so stupid or inexperienced people are fucked thank you obama
he’s such a fucking asshole
if u can keep one shoe on you might marry a Prince
The example of hiring Obama should have fucked over the stupid and experienced anyway…
Fleecing the taxpayers! Is there anything it can’t do?
And that’s the state we’re wanting to give D.C. to. On the bright side, it shows what kind of state D.C. would be, all by its lonesome.
Living there was a bit of a chore, if only for having to endure the pretensions of the “make D.C. a state” crowd who never grasped the meaning of the subtle understanding of tyranny embedded in the Framer’s clever finesse of the local rule problem. Morons, that crowd, and it was precisely to escape them I left.
Chris DeMuth, address to the Transatlantic Law Forum (h/t M. Greve): Executive Government and Bankrupt Government