Is Another Mediocre Jobs Report The Best We Can Do?
Employment: The media and economics pundits were almost giddy over the not-so-surprising news that the economy added 227,000 payroll jobs in February. Is this the best we can do? We hope not.
Sure, three months of 200,000-plus job creation is a great thing. We're happy for all those Americans who are now putting on their work clothes and earning a paycheck.
But this is far short of the growth needed. And that's not sour grapes. It's a statistical fact. Let's just look for a moment at the true state of the U.S. jobs economy.
As IBD's own Ed Carson noted on investors.com, U.S. jobs peaked 49 months ago and we're not even close to being back. That's the longest jobs recession since the Great Depression. Meanwhile, GDP growth hasn't topped 4% in almost six years — the longest stretch of sub-4% growth ever. And we're supposed to cheer this?
The best one can say is that, based on current data, we're still down more than 5 million jobs from where we were 49 months ago. Even at February's rate, it would take until February 2014 just to get back to even.
Not much to brag about, is it?
In fact, it's even worse than that. Obama's economy is — depending how you calculate — somewhere around 10 million to 11 million jobs behind where it should be.
The reason is the 100,000 new entrants into the job market each month that have to be sopped up, along with all those people who lost jobs or have quit looking.
Again, even at February's job creation rate of 227,000 a month, it would take until early 2016 before we got back to "normal."
This isn't an accident. It is the inevitable result of the higher spending and soaring debt of Obamanomics, which has brought slow GDP growth, torpid job creation, higher prices and declining family wealth.
Some will note that the jobless rate remained stuck at 8.3% in February, largely because the labor force expanded that month — offsetting the job growth. People returning to the job market, they say, is a good sign.
There's some truth to that. But don't forget, that 8.3% number doesn't include 4.4 million people who've stopped looking for a job and aren't counted in the workforce. If you count them, unemployment is 10.8%.
In February 2009, the White House promised that if Congress passed its $836 billion stimulus, unemployment wouldn't go above 8%. Well, unemployment hasn't been below 8% since Obama's first month in office, and has averaged 9.3% during his term.
Obama pays lip service to wanting more jobs. Yet, just last week, he lobbied heavily against a Senate amendment to revive the Keystone XL pipeline. On Thursday, the Senate took it out — killing hundreds of thousands of high-wage jobs the pipeline would have created.
Is Obama serious at all about jobs? We may soon see.
The House has passed by a 390-23 vote a bill to make it easier for small businesses to go public and raise capital.
Obama has suggested he might support the Republican bill, which would make it the first bipartisan jobs initiative of his so-far job-destroying administration.
We hope he's serious. We fear he's just paying lip-service to something he doesn't really believe in to show people he's not a partisan hack. |
