There was a lot of discussion this past weekend on the Sunday talk show circuit regarding the March Jobs Report released last Friday. Only 88,000 jobs were added in March. Compared to February, which added 268,000 jobs, this is a 180,000 drop. Actually, more like a plummet: economists had figured more than twice that number would be added. However, this number was the lowest jobs addition since in nine months (June 2012).
Why was this one so terrible? The pundit debate this weekend was puzzled and trying to discern the cause — Was it sequestration? The 2% payroll tax? The weather? Other? Why this anomaly when prior reports of the last few months were good. (Translation: how do we spin this atrocity?)
Here’s the truth. We haven’t had a good jobs report in nearly 5 years.
Yes, we are adding jobs, but they are not enough. We are barely adding enough jobs to cover the natural population growth. That is currently calculated (for this month) to be roughly 106,000 jobs in order to keep pace with population. In fact, this most recent report didn’t even cover that.
Yes, we are going down in unemployment (from 7.7% – 7.6%)– but not because we are adding jobs. It’s because less people are actively looking for a job. The Labor Department noted that 496,000 Americans stopped working or looking for work. That’s nearly half-a-million in one month.
This jobs report just compounds nearly 5 years of Obama’s policies. From Obamacare burdens, to increased regulation, to higher taxes, we are no where near a recovery, and really haven’t been.
If you are interested in a decent jobs calculator, the Atlanta Fed has a neat little one set up that gives you all kinds of data, percentages, etc in a multitude of categories. You can click here to play with it.
For instance, if you wanted to get the unemployment rate down to 6% over the next 12 months (a year to achieve this rate), the average monthly change in payroll employment needed to achieve the target unemployment rate would be … 303,141 jobs a month. When was the last time those numbers were consistently that high? Years…
As you can see, We haven’t been there with job creation in a long time. With Obama’s policies continuing to undermine our country and small businesses, the recovery will be continue to be excruciatingly slow and disappointing.
Crossposted at alanjoelny.com