It seemed like yesterday Obama had an imaginary “Mission Accomplished” banner behind him when he spoke about the unemployment numbers. “Did you hear the economy added jobs in March? The economy really is turning a corner! I swear!” Well, not so fast.
As Mark noted on Noonan For Nevada, the real unemployment rate actually increased in March.
Now, if we are in a recovery as the experts say, then its ok to guess that 81,000 jobs were created on top of the 81,000 you know about. But if we’re not in a recovery, then the guess is nonsense and unemployment is actually higher than the numbers suggest. Given that what the BLS calls the “U-6” number of unemployed was 17.3% in December, 16.5% in January, 16.8% in February and 16.9% in Mrach, I think we can see something other than an economic recovery.
What is the “U-6″? That is everyone who isn’t working – official unemployed, partially employed and workers who given up because there simply are no jobs to be had. This figure has been steadily rising since the drop between December and January and seems to be marching back towards the 17.9% peak of February, 2009.
During the Bush years, as the unemployment rate kept going down toward 4% and jobs kept getting added to the economy month after month, Democrats kept trying to find ways to write off the numbers as bogus. They weren’t “real jobs” they said, they were McJobs, “low-paying, low-prestige job that requires few skills.” Meanwhile, as the unemployment rate went into double digits under Obama, they’re telling us bad is news is good news. Go figure. Now that we have an actual problem with under-employment, the “McJobs” talking point has yet to be made. But then again, Obama desperately needs to prove that the stimulus actually worked.
Wizbang explains why the government jobs added to the economy last month are not exactly worth getting excited about:
out of those 162,000 new jobs, 39,000 were directly attributable to the census hiring binge and another 80,000 were government jobs. Taking away those major components of the report, probably only 40,000 net new private sector jobs were created and it is those jobs that pave the way to recovery. Voters understand this, which explains why the President’s job approval numbers continues to deteriorate.
We saw a direct connection between the Bush tax cuts and unemployment going down, yet Obama’s stimulus is struggling to produce tangible results. The legislation Obama said would keep unemployment below 8 percent has us teetering around 10 percent right now.
As millions are still out of work, Obama can try to claim victory in fixing the economy, but there’s not much there worth taking credit for is it? A massive infusion of government jobs won’t help the economy. Government jobs need our tax dollars in order to fund them. With a new health care mandate and other tax increases coming, don’t expect the private sector to be adding the jobs needed to bring us back the low unemployment rate we had under Bush.