Good News on Jobs

For the third month in a row, the Bureau of Labor Statistics Household Survey of the labor market is showing strong positive growth.

(Yes, I know that there were "jobs lost" in the January and February employment report, but that comes from the Establishment Survey and we don't put too much faith in that here at roadtothemiddleclass.com)

Here are the numbers:

	Jan	Feb	Mar
Labor Force Change	+111,000	+342,000	+398,000
Employment Change	+541,000	+308,000	+264,000

This is good news. The Employment numbers show strong employment growth, although moderating month-on-month since the gangbusters half-a-million increase in the January number.

The Labor Force numbers are good too. They show that people are getting the word that employers are hiring, so they are returning to the labor force in ever increasing numbers and looking for work.

I think we can look for several months of good numbers based on what we see here.

The question is what happens in the future with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts Jan 1, 2011, and the deadening effect of all the increases in government spending courtesy of the Obama administration.

Here at roadtothemiddleclass.com we don't believe that increased government spending creates jobs. We believe that the way to create jobs is to cut government spending and cut tax rates. Works every time it is tried.

The big problem is that about 8.5 million jobs were lost in the recession. At the current rate of about 250,000 new jobs per month, say 3,000,000 a year, we are looking at three years to get back to the jobs peak in 2007, and another couple of years to get back on trend. We are talking about the 5,000,000 jobs that coulda, woulda, shoulda been created but for the meltdown and the recession.

As usual, the only place we can really look for help on the future is the stock market, which is always trying to look to the future. It has pretty well recovered to 2008 levels before the meltdown. But it is not forecasting right now a gangbusters economy in the year ahead.