For the 67,000 Americans who got new private-sector jobs in August, getting those jobs obviously was good.
But for many others, there were job losses in various sectors of the economy, including the loss of temporary Census Bureau jobs. So there was a net loss of 54,000 jobs in the United States last month. That helped drive the unemployment rate up from 9.5 percent to 9.6 percent.
OK, that’s clearly not “good news.” But let’s suppose for a moment that there aren’t further cuts in government jobs this month. In that case, shouldn’t the kind of private-sector job creation we saw in August start reducing unemployment?
Unfortunately not.
Let’s say the private sector creates another 67,000 jobs this month and government employment levels stay the same. While it may seem odd, that would actually increase overall unemployment.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, a former associate editor of The Wall Street Journal and a professor of economics, explains why: “(I)t takes approximately double the reported 67,000 private sector jobs gain each month just to stay even with the growth in the work force,” he wrote in a piece for The Trends Research Institute.
In other words, the natural growth of the labor force from high school and college graduates, immigrants and others entering the job market is consuming private-sector jobs twice as fast as they can be created! The anemic current rate of job growth has our nation losing rather than gaining ground.
While President Barack Obama continues to claim that his and Congress’ big “stimulus” spending has America on the right path, it’s hard to believe all that spending would not have started reducing unemployment by now if it were going to do so. It’s even harder to believe that the tens of billions of dollars more he wants to spend will work if the original $862 billion stimulus didn’t – much less that his plan to raise taxes will jump-start the economy.
Isn’t it past time for Congress and the president to reverse their disastrous course – or for the American people to elect lawmakers who will?