strib: What jobs?/Labor market still sputtering

[question everything]

startribune.com

Editorial: What jobs?/Labor market still sputtering
Published July 16, 2005

During last year's presidential campaign Democrats pummeled President Bush for his handling of the economy, noting that his job-creation record was the worst since Herbert Hoover. But voters seemed to shrug off the issue, Bush won the election, and the topic pretty well dropped off the national radar.

That does not mean, however, that the job market has gotten any better. Consider the government's latest employment report, released July 8 by the Labor Department. It shows that the economy is creating jobs at just half the pace of the typical postwar recovery and that job creation this year is actually worse than it was last year. At about 180,000 new jobs per month, the economy is creating barely enough employment to absorb a growing population, let alone provide hope for workers seeking new or better jobs. While it's true that the nation's unemployment rate fell to a low 5 percent in June, that was chiefly because thousands of workers simply dropped out of the labor force and are no longer counted in the government survey.

(snip)

Steady and healthy? This is the worst jobs recovery since World War II, according to Labor Department statistics. Economists William Rodgers of Rutgers and Richard Freeman of Harvard estimate that the economy would have nearly 6 million additional jobs today if it were merely performing at the nation's historical average. Wages of the typical worker have stagnated or fallen since the recovery began and the nation has lost more than 2 million manufacturing jobs. The share of Americans with jobs, which rose to a record level in the 1990s, has fallen sharply and is still lower than when the recession began in 2001.

Readers who follow the economy will recall that it doesn't have to be this way. During the second half of the last recovery, from 1995 to 2000, the economy created nearly 250,000 jobs a month. Wages rose across the income spectrum, even after adjustment for inflation, and the nation began to reverse a long climb in income inequality. Today, that period is beginning to look like a lucky anomaly.

(snip)

http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/5509257.html

[Tux]

1. Dang

I miss the 90's. If this keeps up, it'll show that the libertarians won and tyranny is near.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

2. I think you confuse your politcal stripes

The Power party controls all three branches now (or 90 percent of the judiciary except perhaps the 9th circuit and the SC). They have no love for the Libertarians. The Power party, the Republican Party, which craves power at any cost, is fundamentally authoritarian.

[Broken_Hero]

3. They don't care...

Its plain and simple, its not in their interest to help with jobs, or worry about it, which makes me scratch my head when i talk with folks who are trying to find work, and who also vote Republican, its an oxy moron, vote for the people who don't give a flying hoot about you...