>America Needs More Job Creation
Mike Brownfield
December 2, 2011 at 10:26 am
After months upon months of unemployment stuck at or above 9 percent, the American people may finally see a sliver of relief in today’s jobs report from the Department of Labor. The report suggests the month of November saw 120,000 net new jobs created and the unemployment rate drop to 8.6 percent–driven in part by the 315,000 people who have given up looking for work and were no longer counted as unemployed. That news is cold comfort to the 13.3 million Americans who are still out of work and the 402,000 workers who filed for unemployment last week.
The question is whether this improvement is real and enduring or a fluke. The economy is growing, but there’s little evidence of the real strength the report suggests, and there’s a lot in the report to suggest something’s amiss with the numbers–something likely to be corrected in the next report. For example, is it likely the labor market strengthened as much as the job number suggests at the same time so many people abandoned the workforce? And this is only one of the anomalies in the report.
The White House would therefore be wise to trumpet today’s news with soft notes. The fact remains that under President Barack Obama’s watch, the U.S. unemployment rate remains high because America just isn’t creating enough new jobs. And if the only way the Obama Administration can get the unemployment rate to drop is by convincing people to quit looking for work, that’s bad news for the American economy. Or to quote liberal blogger Matt Yglesias, ”Decreasing unemployment by shrinking the labor force is not exactly winning the future.”
It goes without saying that if the U.S. economy loses more jobs than it creates, the unemployment rate goes up. If job losses are low but few new jobs are created, then the unemployment rate treads water and remains high, with occasional dips and rises–and that’s what we’re seeing today.
As Heritage’s James Sherk writes, in the last quarter of 2007, private employers created 7.6 million jobs and shed 7.4 million jobs. That was enough net new jobs to keep unemployment steady as new workers entered the labor force. During the recession, job losses increased, hitting 8.5 million jobs lost in the first quarter of 2009. The good news is that today, job losses are well below their pre-recession rates, hitting a record low in the first quarter of 2011. The bad news is that few new jobs are being created, leaving America in the economic doldrums. Sherk explains:
https://blog.heritage.org/2011/12/02/morning-bell-america-needs-more-job-creation/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
