Friday, June 1, 2012

Signs of Life on Jobs

Yes, I know.  Everyone is throwing themselves on the floor about the uptick in the unemployment rate from 8.1 to 8.2 percent.  And the number of jobs in the establishment survey is only up 69,000.

But the reason the unemployment rate did an uptick is that people are reentering the labor force in strength.  The labor force number went up by 642,000 last month, which is very good news.  It means that people are getting out there and looking for jobs.  Employment went up by 422,000, which is also very good news.  But since it didn't go up as much as the labor force, the unemployment rate went up.

What is going on?

This is another case where liberals have been sending the wrong message for decades, and now they are getting snake-bit by their own misdirection.  The thing is that in the early stages of a recovery, as people start to judge that jobs are available, they will come into the labor force and start looking.  Since they probably won't find jobs right away, they will raise the unemployment rate.  This is good.  But in the Nancy Pelosi playbook, when Republicans are in charge, you rail about a "jobless recovery."  So what do you do when the same thing happens in a Democratic administration?  You tell me.

In the subpar Obama recovery, one of the reasons that people have not got back to work is that the 99 week extended unemployment benefit makes people put off looking for a job.  We've heard recently that a lot of people are running out of their extended benefits, and are thus "forced" back into the labor force.  Maybe that is why people are returning to the labor force.

Liberals have done a lot of misdirection on economics over the years, from Keynesian stimulus, to lifetime employment, to union thuggery, to first-dollar health benefits to "price gouging" to "vampire" capitalism.  They have encouraged millions of Americans to have unrealistic ideas about the economy.

Well, mark down 2012 as the year of the return to reality.  All the liberal economic myths are coming home to roost and the liberals find themselves in a replay of Hitchcock's The Birds.  And they don't know what to do.

The simple truth is, of course, that every government intervention harms the economy and privileges some special interest over the common interest.  And that starts with cheap money and every single government subsidy and corporate goodie, and it ends at the mortgage interest deduction, Social Security and Medicare.  Sure.  Don't touch My Medicare!  But some poor slob or slobette is working 40 hours a week so that well-to-do seniors like me can get subsidized health care.  Talk about fairness.

As Bill Clinton said in another era:  Everything that should be down is up, and everything that should be up is down!  But Bill Clinton and his team were a much better political team than President Obama and his lot.  And it shows.

1 comment:

  1. Following yesterday’s disappointing jobs report, consumer confidence fell five points overnight. It often takes up to a week before the impact of a jobs report is fully measured.

    Among investors, the impact was especially dramatic. On Friday, just before the jobs report, investors were almost evenly divided as to their own financial trends—35% said things were getting better, while 39% said the opposite. On Saturday morning, just 30% of investors believe their finances are getting better, while 43% think they are getting worse. The stock market had a terrible month of May and the Dow fell by 275 points following the jobs report.

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