From Matthew Yglesias: “If we keep adding jobs at roughly the pace we added them in December and January, then the United States will return to full employment some time in 2024. . . . To get back to full employment by 2017—a pathetic goal, by the way—job growth would have to further accelerate so that we add an average of 321,000 jobs per month, each and every month, for more than 50 months in a row.”
Yes. That's the legacy George Bush left us.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBut...but...we added like, a million jobs last month! The economy is fixed! Obama is going to beat Romney worse than Reagan beat Mondale!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWe conservatives should approve of a smaller work force if part of the reason is because it means less of a need for both spouses to work. Homes are cheaper now -- one good result of the burst housing bubble. Maybe more families are doing ok w/one income. Maybe more kids are actually growing up in more stable families where both parents aren't always having to come and go at breakneck speed. Many more families are reducing debt, living more simply with some finding it actually unnecessary to have two incomes. How many of these "volunteer" dropouts from the workforce are there? There's enough to rip Obama about w/out unwittingly denigrating positive social results that flow from the economic turmoil.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNot to mention that we actually lost over 700,000 jobs last month in real terms. Even with seasonable adjustment the picture doesn't look good. The 250,000 jobs last month were the product of government statisticians' secret sauce.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBut...but...unemployment is at 8.2% which is less than it was in Reagan's term at this point and it's gone down 5 straight months in a row!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYglesias - a leftist hack promoted a few years back by some around here as "a liberal with whom we can have an honest debate" - correctly sees the problem, but argues for precisely the wrong remedy. More "easing" from the Fed only buries us deeper into Bernanke's Japan-like strategy of interest rates near zero and government stimulus. In Japan it led to a decade of stagnation.
We cannot fully recover from a recession if we attempt to prevent the paid of restructuring from occurring. But that is the only goal of Democratic policies.
The pain cannot be avoided, and only will be made worse the longer it is postponed. We need a President who understands he cannot possibly implement the necessary policies and be reelected. The federal jobs alone that need to be cut will ensure unemployment remains frightfully high through the next term.
Of course, not making the cuts won't help at all, because we remain on the tightrope of default and downgrade. Either way, it's one term for the next President. May he make the most of it!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe United States unemployment rate went from 14.7% in 1940 to 1.2% in 1944 (with some help from Hitler and Togo).
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Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt's always cute when Ramesh (not an economist) quotes Yglesias (not an economist) in economics posts.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe problem with these numbers is they rely on bad statistics from the BLS. We know, for example, that we bring in over 100,000 new foreign workers every month. We also know that the labor pool in this country grows by about 100,000 every month, not counting foreign workers. We also know the current figures from BLS have magically "disappeared" over ten million workers from the labor pool since the peak of the Bush years.
The scandal here is not that the Feds use bogus models to report on the economy. That has been known for a long time. The scandal is the Left using those bogus numbers to promote a plain falsehood.
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