President Barack Obama and fellow Democrats in Congress are playing a bit of a word game by assuring the nation that our economy is on the mend and is in “recovery.” They point, in part, to very modest private-sector job creation to make that claim.
What they don’t point out is that the small number of private-sector jobs being created is not nearly enough to keep up with the natural growth of the size of the workforce, from high school and college graduates, immigrants and so forth.
People are entering the workforce roughly twice as fast as companies can create jobs to provide them employment.
With the need for jobs growing much faster than the creation of jobs, employment is obviously losing, rather than gaining, ground.
Yet some still insist on calling that “recovery.”
It surely doesn’t feel like recovery to those who are sadly part of our nation’s 9.6 percent unemployment rate, nor to millions more who are involuntarily “underemployed.”
It will take more than word games to help them.