Click on WORD or PDF for full content
You know our job creation is terrible when even the NY Times finds something wrong with the obama ‘recovery.’
The American economy may be the world’s biggest, but when it comes to job creation since the recession hit at the end of 2007, it is far from a leader.
Indeed, contrary to the widespread view that the United States is an island of relative prosperity in a global sea of economic torpor, employment in several other nations has bounced back more quickly, according to a new analysis by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The government reported Friday that the nation added 175,000 jobs in May, continuing a 32-month run of job gains. The unemployment rate moved up slightly to 7.6 percent, from 7.5 percent in April.
But overall employment in the United States remained 2.1 percent below where it was at the end of 2007, according to the statistics bureau. By comparison, over the same period, between December 2007 and March 2013, the number of jobs was up 8.1 percent in Australia; Germany, the biggest economy in the troubled euro zone, has managed a 5.8 percent gain in employment.
“The United States is way below where it should be,” said Lawrence F. Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard. “We had a massive downturn and a tepid recovery.”
Still, Friday’s jobs report appeared to be just what Wall Street was hoping for. Major stock market indexes jumped by 1.3 percent as traders bet that the modest employment gains and the uptick in joblessness meant that the Federal Reserve would be forced to keep pumping money into the economy in a bid to stimulate greater growth. …
John Hinderaker posts on the Times’ angst, and the fact our performance lags Canada and MEXICO!
We are now nearly five years into the Age of Obama, and I think pretty much everyone understands that, economically speaking, the record is poor. If you think unprecedented levels of unemployment and poverty, declining labor force participation, booming food stamp use and so on are the signs of a healthy economy, then you should be satisfied with the Obama administration. Otherwise, not.
It must have hurt the New York Times to report this, but report it they did: “Many Rival Nations Surge Past the U.S. in Adding New Jobs.”
[C]ontrary to the widespread view that the United States is an island of relative prosperity in a global sea of economic torpor, employment in several other nations has bounced back more quickly, according to a new analysis by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Where might that “widespread view” have come from? The Times takes no responsibility. …
… So how does the current recovery in the U.S. stack up, compared with the same period of time in Canada and Mexico?
Using consistent data on the United States, Canada and Mexico, I plotted GDP growth for the three countries on a quarterly basis from first quarter of 2010 to the present. That timing is significant, because in all three countries the recession was over by 2010 and recovery was in progress. So what we are comparing is the strength of the recovery in the three adjacent countries. This chart shows the quarterly increase in GDP from 2010 Q1 through Q1 of 2013:
As you can see, on a quarter by quarter basis, the U.S. has lagged behind Canada and, especially, Mexico. …
IBD Editors on the missing 7.6 million jobs.
Although somewhat better than expected, the 175,000 net jobs created in May continues the historically tepid jobs growth trend that has come to characterize the now four-year-old economic recovery.
The result has been continued high unemployment, a vast pool of long-term jobless, and an unprecedented number of people who’ve dropped out of the labor force.
Highlighting the weakness of the May report is the fact that the number of unemployed climbed by nearly the same amount as jobs created — 101,000 — nudging the unemployment rate up to 7.6%.
As a result, there are still 2.4 million fewer people working than there were in January 2008, the previous jobs peak. And since the recovery started in June 2009, the number of jobs has increased a mere 3.9%, well below the post-World War II average of 9.7%.
In fact, had this jobs recovery merely kept pace with the average of the previous 10, there would be 7.6 million more people working today, and the unemployment rate would be less than half its current level. …
Sherman Frederick of the Las Vegas Review-Journal has more on the economy.
… But how bad is it, really?
Up until very recently, this was hard to quantify and thus became in large part a political argument. Today, however, enough time has passed that economists now have data points to scientifically put President Barack Obama’s economic policy in its proper place.
On the old legacy-o-meter, things aren’t looking good for Obama and his supporters, who so desperately wanted him to succeed.
I’m tempted to compare Obama’s performance on the economy to this year’s Phoenix Suns basketball team. But that might be too harsh — on the Suns.
The Suns were a crummy basketball team this season, for sure. They were pathetic from start to finish. But when things were not going well, they at least changed things up to get a better outcome. The Suns finished ahead of Cleveland and Charlotte. Had they suited up their old star, Connie Hawkins, they might have finished ahead of a few other teams, too.
President Obama, meanwhile, kept the same economic game plan and failed policies in place for 4½ years. Clear evidence is mounting to show that Obama’s stubbornness (or shall we call it ignorance) might earn him the title of Worst Economic President Ever. …
Michael Strain of American.com has another way to look at the lack of recovery.
The two numbers that will get the most attention, by far, from today’s jobs report are 7.6 and 175,000. In May, the unemployment rate increased just a bit to 7.6%, and employers added 175,000 nonfarm payroll jobs. The basic story of the labor market recovery remains the same: it is steady but too slow.
But I encourage you to pay attention to three other numbers which, to my mind, are much more important than 7.6 and 175,000. They are 2.4, 4.4., and 0.4.
We still have 2.4 million fewer jobs than when the recession officially began 66 months ago. Relative to previous downturns, this performance is quite bad.
We still have 4.4 million workers who have been unemployed for six months or longer. This is a very large number. Outside this downturn, the previous post-war record was under 3 million, back in the 1980s. Over 37% of the total unemployed are long-term unemployed. The previous post-war record, also back in the 1980s, was a comparatively low 26%.
When the Great Recession began in December 2007, 62.7% of the working-age population was employed; today it is a staggeringly lower 58.6%. The share of the working-age population with jobs has increased by only 0.4 percentage points since its low point in the official recovery. Though it doesn’t get much attention, many labor economists prefer the employment-to-population ratio as the best measure of the broad health of the labor market. That this measure has improved so little indicates that the economy is creating just a few more jobs than are needed to keep up with population growth. But this is not enough. We need to create enough jobs to handle the growth of the working-age population and to recover the jobs lost in the Great Recession. To put it simply, we are not succeeding. …