For the third straight month, the nation’s unemployment rate is stuck at a painful 9.7 percent.
Oddly, the Obama administration used the announcement of that figure by the Labor Department as an occasion to celebrate supposedly strong “job growth.” That will come as a surprise to the 15 million Americans who are searching for jobs unsuccessfully — and to the millions more who want full-time work but can find only part-time jobs, or who have given up the search in frustration. The unemployment rate of 9.7 percent is awful, but the so-called “underemployment” rate of nearly 17 percent is atrocious. Plus, a record high of nearly 7 million Americans have been out of work for six months or longer.
Despite those grim numbers, the president declared, “The worst of the storm is over,” The Charlotte Observer reported. He cited 162,000 new jobs nationwide in March.
But even that modest number is not as good as it looks. Nearly a third of those jobs are temporary federal hires by the U.S. Census Bureau. More jobs paid for by the federal government — as opposed to the productive private sector — means more federal spending to add to our $12.7 trillion national debt. That’s just shuffling wealth around, not creating it.
The Census Bureau may need those workers to get an accurate count of people in the United States, but more government spending is not what our country needs to get the economy back on track.