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Jennifer Rubin gets to have the first reaction to the most recent rotten jobs report of this presidency.
The consensus prediction for job growth in March was 200,000. In fact it was 88,000. Even more troubling, about a half-million people left the job market, driving the country’s job-participation rate to the lowest point since 1979.
On CNBC this morning, former Obama administration officials Jared Bernstein and Austan Goolsbee were glum, struggling to find a rationale. The sequester! Well, no. Public-sector jobs were down only 7,000. The payroll tax hike? Could be. While the president was haggling over the top marginal rate, no one in the administration seemed to care about the significant dip in take-home pay that would hit low- and middle-income consumers and, in turn, deal a blow to retail, restaurant and other consumer-based industries. Could it be that tax hikes are bad for the economy?
The president, rightfully so, will take another pummeling for failing to focus on jobs. And the push by the president and Senate Democrats for tax hikes will appear even more ludicrous (as liberal economic gurus bemoan the impact of the payroll tax hike).
There is no substitute for a strong private sector. Right now, employers aren’t hiring. You can attribute that to nervousness over Obamacare or to the payroll tax or to the aggregate burden of taxes and regulations, but the economy remains hobbled. And worst of all, we are approaching the point, as during the Great Depression, when sustained high unemployment will have ripples for years and years to come.
Reaction to the jobs numbers has been swift and brutal. Douglas Holtz-Eakin from the American Action Forum writes, “The March jobs report was awful: jobs weak, labor force down, hours flat, and earnings flat. The jobs report is important not because of any single month, but because it is the leading indicator of a break away from the new normal: bad growth and weak opportunity. No break to be found today. The Administration has slavishly adhered to the economic doctrines of Jimmy Carter. They should not be surprised they are getting his results.”
Meanwhile, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) put out a statement, which read in part: “The president’s policies continue to make it harder for Americans to find work. Hundreds of thousands fled the workforce last month and unemployment remains far above what the Obama administration promised when it enacted its ‘stimulus’ spending plan.” He urged the president to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, tax reform and a replacement bill for the sequester. Republicans plainly intend to put the spotlight back on the president who spent his time this week hawking gun control and attending a lavish fundraiser.
John Steele Gordon is next.
… What is causing this stagnant job market after so deep a recession? The answer is that the amount of uncertainty in the marketplace is not declining, indeed it is growing, and there is nothing markets hate more than uncertainty. Europe’s deteriorating financial and economic situation is surely not helping, nor is the forthcoming implementation of Obamacare, with a legion of unanswered questions about how it will affect businesses from the Fortune 500 on down. When even two-thirds of Democrats think that Obamacare will either adversely impact them personally or have no effect, there is going to be a strong tendency to wait and see what happens.
If a Republican were in the White House, the mainstream media would be howling in outrage about this continuing terrible job market and demanding action. But since it’s Obama in the White House the MSM will undoubtedly be doing its usual oh-look!-a-squirrel! routine.
Allister Heath in Telegraph, UK on the disaster created by the UK’s push to send millions more to college.
Tragically, as yet more data reveal, the decision to massively increase the number of school-leavers going to university, wrongly assuming that this would transform opportunity in an era of technological revolution, ranks as one of the greatest social and industrial policy blunders of recent decades.
Britain is facing a jobs crisis made in Downing Street and signed off by the leaders of all political parties, starting with Sir John Major, during the past quarter century. The problem is not the number of new jobs – there are lots of those, confounding the sceptics, and could be even more if the labour market doesn’t become over-regulated. The issue is that an obscenely large number of young people with a university education will not be able to find a job that matches their expectations.
Research from the US government, which without doubt applies equally to Britain, suggests that just one out of the top nine occupations expected to create the most jobs this decade requires a university degree.
The picture is truly dire for the army of university graduates: only five of the top 30 fastest-growing occupations expected to create the most jobs by 2020 require an undergraduate degree (or an additional post-graduate qualification) – nursing, teachers in higher education, primary school teachers, accountants and medical doctors – and 10 of the top 30 don’t require any kind of qualification at all. …
… Many jobs will genuinely require university degrees, especially those with quantitative and mathematical skills, and of course it is essential that children of all backgrounds who have the interest and ability to study for a degree be given the opportunity to do so. But if we really care about social mobility, and ensuring that people are able to live their dreams, we need an urgent shift in policy.
Britain needs more, better, skilled jobs – and that means making the UK more welcoming as a base for firms in areas such as technology, science, finance and high value added business services.
The onslaught against the City, which is crippling it rather than seeking to make it more resilient, will merely reduce the availability of good jobs.
The answer is not more top-down planning of the sort that gave us our higher education crisis, with politicians choosing sectors they guess will create the “right” sort of jobs, but a broad policy to encourage global firms to base their best-paid positions in the UK, and to trade and export from our shores.
That means low tax rates and living costs, a better business climate and enhanced infrastructure and airport links; sadly, we are faring miserably in all areas. …
… Apprenticeships and vocational qualifications are essential: had politicians focused on these in recent decades, rather than on boosting university admissions at any cost, the prospects for Britain’s young would be very different today.
Most important of all, however, the political establishment needs to start telling our young people the truth: it doesn’t make sense for everybody to go to university.
This was all explained in 2010 by a post from the blog The View from Alexandria. The post was titled Reynolds’s Law.
I haven’t been blogging much lately, because I haven’t had many thoughts that haven’t been better expressed elsewhere. But I have to draw attention to a remark of Glenn Reynolds, which seems to me to express an important and little-noticed point:
“The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.”
I dub this Reynolds’ Law: “Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them.” It’s easy to see why. If people don’t need to defer gratification, work hard, etc., in order to achieve the status they desire, they’ll be less inclined to do those things. The greater the government subsidy, the greater the effect, and the more net harm produced.
This law is thus a relative to Murray’s third law in Losing Ground, the Law of Net Harm: “The less likely it is that the unwanted behavior will change voluntarily, the more likely it is that a program to induce change will cause net harm.” But Reynolds’ Law rests on a different and more secure foundation. It focuses on character as fundamental. …
More on misplaced education priorities from FrontPage Mag. (Sarcasm alert)
We need to invest more in college education so that college graduates can get jobs that don’t require college degrees while paying off piles of student debt for an unnecessary college degree.
And that will help our colleges pay off their massive burden of debt. Welcome to the Obama Economy. (via Instapundit)
The recession left millions of college-educated Americans working in coffee shops and retail stores. Now, new research suggests their job prospects may not improve much when the economy rebounds.
Underemployment—skilled workers doing jobs that don’t require their level of education—has been one of the hallmarks of the slow recovery. By some measures, nearly half of employed college graduates are in jobs that don’t traditionally require a college degree.
Economists have generally assumed the problem was temporary: As the economy improved, companies would need more highly educated employees. But in a paper released Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a team of Canadian economists argues that the U.S. faces a longer-term problem.
They found that unlike the 1990s, when companies needed hundreds of thousands of skilled workers to develop, build and install high-tech systems—everything from corporate intranets to manufacturing robots—demand for such skills has fallen in recent years, even as young people continued to flock to programs that taught them.
Richard Cohen was not impressed with the salary stunt.
… This president is independently rich. He is rich by dint of his own talent and industry, but rich is rich –- and you probably ain’t. Obama has made a small fortune in book royalties, and last year the president and Michelle Obama reported an adjusted gross income of $789,674. Without having to Google it, I can say that the Obamas made more than your average federal employee –- even including overtime.
So the $20,000 Obama is kicking back to the Treasury is a pittance that will not be missed. (What’s the difference between $789,674 and $769,674? Will the kids not go to camp? Is Hawaii out of the question for next summer? ) But 5 percent for someone making $100,000 is a different story. That’s five grand, and it well could be camp or a vacation. It is not chump change.
Obama was once poor –- although young and poor is not the same as old and poor –- so I know he can appreciate what that 5 percent can mean. The president was apparently responding to the symbolism of him living like a pasha while asking others to sacrifice. I understand. But his taking a wee haircut on his salary is just a PR stunt from the White House that’s more insulting than it is empathetic.
Theodore Dalrymple on a little disability scam in England.
Earlier this month, British newspapers reported the story of Paul Marshallsea, a Welshman who, while on a two-month Australian holiday with his wife, wrestled a six-foot shark to prevent it from attacking children in the water. Marshallsea happened to be filmed while doing so, and the pictures went around the world. He was proclaimed a hero.
Unfortunately for him, the pictures also reached Wales. He and his wife were supposed to be on sick leave at the time with “work-related stress,” and his heroics didn’t impress his employers: they sacked him, on the not-unreasonable grounds that if he could travel to Australia and wrestle with a shark, he could probably have made it into work. Moreover, photographs of the couple suggested that they were having the holiday of a lifetime, rather than merely recuperating from serious illness. …
… The story illustrates a fundamental truth about contemporary Britain: it is now a sink of corruption, moral, intellectual, and financial, all of it perfectly legal.
Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.
Fallon: President Obama says his NCAA bracket is busted, worst picks he ever made. Then he looked at his economic advisers and said, “Ehh, maybe not.”
Leno: President Obama did not take VP Joe Biden to Israel with him. He figured the Jews had suffered enough.
Leno: The U.S. Senate is fighting to keep open its own Senate Barber Shop. It losses $350,000 a year. You know what that makes it? The most successful government program ever! It only loses $350,000 a year.
Leno: The island nation of Cyprus has this new 10% tax on individual savings accounts there. They will take 10% of your money right out of the bank. To which President Obama said, “You can do that?”