Payroll employment rises by 223,000 in April; jobless rate essentially unchanged (5.4%)

[progree]

13. As for full-time jobs less than when we had a white man in the White House

Last edited Fri May 8, 2015, 09:29 PM - Edit history (1)

We lost 252,000 full-time jobs in April
In fact, the number of full time jobs peaked in Nov 2007 at 121,875,000. Thats right. We have yet to regain the number of full time jobs we had over seven years ago! We are over 1.1 MILLION jobs short of where we were in 2007. And there are 17 million more people now than there were then.
BLS full-time worker data series: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12500000
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026642259

Yes, most of the economic statistics suck when compared to the peak in 2007. This is one of the classic tricks of the right-wing polemicists and their DU allies -- something I mention on my EF-0 page (please see my sigline). It is classic trick #5 (excerpted below):

(5). Comparing the current statistics to 2007's statistics, as if 2007 was a normal economy we should get back to - I see this all the time. Yes, today's economic statistics just about across the board suck compared to 2007's. But keep in mind that 2007 was not a normal economy. It was a very sick bubble economy with a very high fever -- people using their houses as ATMs to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Anybody could get a mortgage, virtually no questions asked. The belief that housing prices never go down, at least not on a national average scale (thus the theory that a geographically diversified bundle of mortgages was always a safe bet).

The same for comparisons to 2000 -- that too was a very sick economy -- astronomical price/earnings ratios in the stock market, day trading and momentum investing. The belief that Alan Greenspan had mastered the "Goldilocks" economy (not too cool, not too warm) and that, now that we understood how to use the Fed's powers to control the economy, we will never have a recession again. That tech companies with huge negative earnings and no business plan were great investments. That we were all going to the moon, and we were all going to the stars (speaking of the economy and the stock market).

Well, I'm extremely very sorry to have to tell you -- we don't want to get back to the very sick high-fever bubble economies of 2000 or 2007. So quit the whining about how things now are so much worse than back then -- no they aren't when you consider the sickness and unsustainability of those economies back then.