Despite Progressive Apologias, Yes, The August Jobs Report Was Bad, and It Does Confirm That This "Recovery" Is Woeful

First of all, apologies. There is a barn-burner argument going on in the coblogger email which I suppose will probably, in some form, make it to the blog.

It's about the pictures stolen from Jennifer Lawrence, and whether or not it's the Christian thing to harbor judgment against her for having taken them at all.

Meanwhile, we had another depressing jobs report which makes sense given that we're ina depression.

As Bob Stein explains below, the August jobs report, released this morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was disappointing -- just 142,000 jobs were added, and the labor force shrunk slightly. This is not atrocious, but it's disappointing because the labor market had had a strong six months, with more than 200,000 added per month and the labor force holding steady. Bob also makes an interesting point about how unreliable August reports have been, and it’s possible with revisions, which can easily be in the range of tens of thousands of jobs, that this report won’t look too bad at all.

But the news has still prompted a couple lame apologias from the liberal economic class....

The economy was going to start adding jobs again [that is, the prog apologists seem to be overlooking that any economy will eventually add jobs -- but we judge the strength of a recovery by how quickly it adds jobs, not that it merely adds jobs at a slack pace], and it hasn't done so very quickly at all. That chart (deployed to destroy the myth of the jobs-killing Obamacare by another Vox writer the other day) tells us nothing useful about the nature of this recovery, except that it has happened. For that one encouraging chart, I could come up with five others that, devoid of context, would make this look like basically no recovery at all -- wage growth, labor-force-participation rate, employment rate as the share of the population, median net worth, median income, etc.

posted by Ace at 01:28 PM

| Access Comments