From the first Morning Jolt of the week:
‘Well, It Could Be Worse.’ (Ominous Growling) ‘It’s Worse.’
John Crudele of the New York Post reiterates some points you’ve seen every now and then on Campaign Spot, but are worth remembering as the jobs picture and high unemployment start to become the defining issue of the 2012 election cycle:
If you are an American looking for work — no, make that pleading to be allowed to earn a living — you already know this: the job market is even worse than Washington is telling us. And Washington yesterday told us that the employment situation is just plain ugly.
For one thing, the number of jobs increased in June only because the Labor Department simultaneously revised downward the number of jobs that existed in this country during May. It’s like moving the fences at Citi Field so the Mets players can hit more home runs. It might make Jose Reyes feel better, but it doesn’t actually make him more powerful.
Without the fence-moving operation in the May employment report, the June number — yesterday’s number — would have shown a decline of 26,000 jobs.
Then there’s another problem with June’s employment report. Included in the 18,000 headline number is a guesstimate that 131,000 jobs were created by newly formed — and, therefore, invisible — companies.
If you want to send your resume to one of these companies, don’t bother. They probably don’t exist, and neither do the jobs the government thinks they are creating. These figments of the imagination of the Labor Department’s computers will probably disappear when the numbers are checked early next year . . . The job numbers are only going to get worse in the months ahead.
For one thing, the government will stop adding jobs for those small, newly formed fictitious companies. That bit of optimistic statistical hocus-pocus has been lifting the job reports during all the spring months.
“In truth, we’ve been losing jobs for several months, possibly several years, depending on how horribly jiggered the numbers are,” speculates Bill Quick.
Cold Fury is fed up with the spin: “The good ship Socialism is on the shoals, and all the lying spin in the world ain’t gonna refloat it. . . . Every month, we get a new, dismal, and ‘unexpected’ bad report on unemployment which, a month or so later, is quietly revised even further downward. Why should this one be any different? Rainbows and unicorn farts aren’t real either, and [President Obama] coasted his whole life on ‘em without ever actually accomplish a damned thing worthy of note, all the way to his nice new throne presiding over the final ruin of the nation.”
The self-described “Scared Monkeys” see a reckoning coming down the pike: “Make no mistake about it, the American voters will remember that Obama said that the $878 billion stimulus would keep unemployment below 8% and that then Democrat Speaker of the House Pelosi said that Obamacare would create 400,000 jobs instantly. Come 2012 there will be a reckoning and Democrats are going to pay an even steeper price than they did in the 2010 midterms.”