Stephen Green takes a look at
yesterday's jobs numbers and the news is not good:
The big number, 8.2% unemployment, is down one-tenth of one percent from last month, on 120,000 net new jobs. But 120,000 is only just barely enough to keep up with population growth, because that’s about how many people should enter the labor force each month, every month, the whole year round. But even more people — 164,000 — simply gave up, stopped looking for work, and are no longer any concern of the BLS. The experts had predicted jobs growth of anywhere from 200,000 to 250,000.
ASIDE: We need to net about 1.5 million jobs a year just to stay even with our growing population. We’ve netted about 2.5 million in the almost three years since the Great Recession ended. So we’re almost two million jobs short of nothing more than treading water. Yeah, that’s bad.
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