Job growth stalls

June 2, 2006

Karl Rove really wants people to believe that the economy is great. Don’t believe your lying eyes, he says, the president’s economic policies are working wonders.

I imagine news like this doesn’t help with the sales pitch.

Employers added fewer workers to payrolls in May as the government’s latest reading on labor market strength came in well below Wall Street expectations, raising hopes that the Federal Reserve will stop its course of rate hikes at its June meeting.

There were 75,000 more U.S. workers in May, according to the closely watched Labor Department report. That compares to the revised 126,000 gain in April. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had forecast that the government’s survey of employers would show a 170,000 pickup in payrolls.

For that matter, average weekly wages fell again, too.

Bush may have hired a new cheerleader to put a positive spin on numbers like these, but it’s hard to characterize numbers like these as the result of a strong economy and effective fiscal policy.

This is supposed to be the Republican leadership’s way to salvage a decent year at the ballot box? By steering the discussion away from Iraq and back towards the domestic economy? Good luck with that strategy.

The only solution is, of course, tax cuts for the wealthy

  • The President’s economic policies are working wonders!

    The unemployment rate actually managed fall slightly on these anemic job growth numbers, and a great many Republican campaign donors probably regard falling wages, as good news: “an indicator that we have nothing to fear from inflation” in Wall St. Journal code.

    Democrats would do better, if they did not criticize Bush for incompetence in economic policy, but instead criticized him for achieving his objectives. Bush has made the oil industry enormously profitable; he’s held down wages; corporate profits are at record highs and the share of wealth and income in the hands of the top 1/2 of 1% is the most dominant since WWII.

    The key task is not just to convince people that Democrats are better economic technicians; rather, Democrats need to remind people that Democrats do not want the same things as Republicans. Republicans in power are getting what Republicans want, and there is a lesson in this example for the American People

  • On 6/2/06 at 19:14 GMT (EST+5) the population of the US is 298,883,496 and the the number of unemployed persons is 7.0 million. And only 75,000 jobs were added in May? Well to look on the bright side, according to the press release unemployment is relatively unchanged.

  • The Repub spin, as mouthed this afternoon by Neal Boortz is: With unemployment near zero, of course new jobs can’t be added.

  • I’m sorry, it was a little slicker than that:

    With near full employment there is no room to add jobs

  • As the Wal-mart republican’ts see it: A minimum wage job is as good as they deserve.

  • Uhh, hello. Look at the labor force participation rates, and you will quickly realize that we are nowhere near full employment. The reason unemployment is so “low” is twofold : 1) still lots of people not in the labor force, and thus not counted. 2) unemployment rate is calculated from a different survey that economist know to be less reliable than the one that the employment numbers (jobs added) comes from. Sorry to say, but even while unemployment stays near a low, the jobs gained numbers are going to get worse, and we’ll end up in recession again with an all time low level of unemployment. Pure horse manure in those stats.

  • I don’t trust any of these economic figures. When you look at the nuts and bolts of how they’re devised, you see they’re all based on projections, statistical models and other variables that can be tweaked to come up with whatever spin the politicos want. Just like the unemployment rate — it doesn’t measure the number of people who don’t have jobs; it counts how many are getting dole payments. When you run through all your bennies, you’re off the rolls and presto! the unemployment rate is lowered a tick. But you still don’t have a job…

    After getting hammered during the 2004 presidential campaign for failing to create a single new job, the Cheney administration decided it would be best to cook the books to make it seem as if there were more jobs out there. But this month, it suits them say there weren’t TOO many created, because if there’s big increase, the Fed will have more reason to raise interest rates. And that will put more pressure on people ready to crack it with their mortgage rates. Next month they might need to announce a huge increase in jobs to counter some bad news from the eternal war. They’ve infiltrated their stooges in the bean-counting departments so the stats can be massaged to say anything that suits them. After all, they create reality, and those of us in the “reality-based community” merely react to what they create.

  • Since the last recession ended in November 2001, the U.S. has added a net 4.35 million jobs, or an average of 82,000 a month, according to press puppet Tony Snow with republican’t TV. That’s less than half the 9.57 million jobs, or 181,000 a month on average, created in the same period of time after the previous recession ended in April 1991.
    Dumbya, Stop “running a game” on America. We have been bullied, labeled unpatriotic, un-American, accused of aiding terrorists, dissected and forced to “choose sides.” All this while Bush’s band of thieves ran rough-shod and unchecked looting through our national treasury, subverting the Constitution and throwing dead bodies of American soldiers on their pile of rumble in a wake of irresponsible chaos and destruction. The chimp president has no clue! Dumbya, Stop “running a game” on America. We have had enough! President Run Amok, Stop “running a game” on America.

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