Robert Oak at the Economic Populist reports that 20,000 of September's jobs were temporary ones and that overall job growth was barely enough to keep up with the growing population --- and that the United States is now down -1.72 million jobs from December 2007.
And Binyamin Applebaum, who likes to take pot shots at the disabled, recently reported in the New York Times that "job growth continued to keep pace with population growth in September, leaving the share of Americans with jobs stuck at 58.6 percent, basically the same low level this 'employment rate' has maintained since September 2009."
What others are saying:
Little Sign of Jobs Impact From Health Care Law - "There’s still little sign that the Affordable Care Act has had much of an impact on employment one way or another. The so-called employer mandate does not come into effect until 2015. So what is driving the decrease in part-time work? Probably the same trends behind the falling unemployment rate...in part the continued bleeding of workers from the labor force."
A Discouraging Picture - "What’s that? We’re in a recovery? Yes, and have been for four years. But you just don’t see enough of it in the job market. Unemployment is still highly elevated, and job growth is once again decelerating."
Obama Advisers Offer Guarded View on Jobs - "The verdict from President Obama’s economic advisers: Better than nothing, not good enough, likely to get worse. The overall pace of job creation has flattened out, and economists generally expect the unemployment rate to continue to drift down only slowly, in part because Americans continue to leave the labor force. The proportion of Americans out of a job for more than six months remains at extraordinarily high levels."
Some Key Job Sectors Turn Softer - "Last year, restaurants and health care accounted for about a third of all the country’s job growth. So some economists were concerned to see, deeper in Tuesday’s jobs report, a softening in those sectors."
Weak Job Gains May Cause Delay in Action by Fed - "Even before the federal government shutdown and the debt ceiling crisis this month, the nation’s economy was lagging and job growth was sluggish. The federal government had the lowest number of civilian employees on its payrolls since 1966."
In other words, the job market, after 5 long years, still sucks. But everybody at Fox News and their followers believe (or are telling us to believe) that their are plenty of jobs to go around.
The New York Times reports:
ReplyDelete"Most Americans who lose their jobs these days are able to find new ones quickly. But those who do not are likely to remain unemployed for a long time. More than a quarter* of the unemployed workers in the United States say they have been out of work for at least a year, and that does not count those who have given up looking, since they are no longer counted as unemployed. There are now more people who have been out of work for a year than there are who have been out of work for four weeks or less. Until 2009, that had not happened since World War II.
(*Actually, of those counted, it's about a third. Including "discouraged workers", we're talking many, many more that have been jobless for over a year...many for 2, 3, 4, and 5 years.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/26/business/economy/for-some-joblessness-is-not-a-temporary-problem.html