Remember all that talk from Bush, late in the campaign, about how his tax cuts had finally started producing a strong job market? Well, forget it.
Payroll growth across the country was sluggish in March as employers added just 110,000 jobs, the fewest since July. Nevertheless, the soft labor market accommodated enough people to drop the unemployment rate to 5.2 percent.
The new figures, released by the Labor Department Friday, offered another mixed picture of America’s hiring climate. The job market has been the sector of the economy that has been among the slowest to recover from the last recession.
“It wasn’t a banner month for the average American worker. We had job growth but not enough to absorb the still large number of unemployed and underemployed people,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com. “The job market is not in full swing.”
Economists had forecast roughly 220,000 jobs for March; the economy obviously produced half that.
But forget Wall Street expectations for a moment and consider that the economy isn’t even creating enough jobs to break even with population growth. This, despite trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy, which Bush was certain would create a robust job market.