America's jobs recovery has lost steam: Even though 49,000 jobs were added in January, the nation is still down nearly 10 million jobs since before the pandemic. Friday's January jobs report also showed that the unemployment rate fell to 6.3%, beating economists' expectations, marking the first decrease in two months. The return of some jobs and a lower unemployment rate are definitely good news. But the US labor market needs great news to get out of this crisis. "It may look good, but it ain't," wrote Gregory Daco, chief US economist at Oxford Economics, adding that the details of the report were a lot less flattering than the headline numbers.Chief among those details is that the private sector only added 6,000 jobs, and then this part from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' full report.
The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for November was revised down by 72,000, from +336,000 to +264,000, and the change for December was revised down by 87,000, from -140,000 to -227,000. With these revisions, employment in November and December combined was 159,000 lowerthan previously reported.Which means that counting the revisions, we are 110,000 jobs BELOW where we thought we were in December. Not good at all. Worse, it means that we are still nearly 8.6 million private sector jobs below our February peak, and nearly 10 million jobs overall.
Maybe some of the long-delayed stimulus measures that finally got passed and signed into law at the end of December will start kicking in (or at least the expanded unemployment and extended eviction moratoriums keeps the losses from multiplying on themselves). But many of those December measures only last through mid-March, and it's becoming clear that we're not going to make much progress on cutting into this 9.9 million-job deficit by then. Which means more has to be done, and soon, in order to stop the bleeding and resume the jobs recovery. Stimulus is a must, and as the Biden Administration and many others have said, this is a situation where spending too much (for both vaccinations and in economic assistance) is a much better side to err on than spending too little, and ending up with muted growth, or worse, a double-dip recession.How this recession compares to previous ones. Jobs deficit today is still bigger than it was at the very worst point of the Great Recession
— Catherine Rampell (@crampell) February 5, 2021
(with thanks to my colleague @salvesergio) pic.twitter.com/i4ZqWO7j2M
Consider, too, that headline unemployment figures do not include the category of “Discouraged Workers,” people who have dropped out of the workforce and have stopped searching for employment.
ReplyDeleteThe pandemic has affected this category of worker, too. Some have dropped out of the job market due to compromised immune systems or for other health-related reasons, to take care of ailing relatives, or to relocate to more prosperous “Blue” states.
Years of Republican non-action at the federal and state levels, much of it due to raw incompetence and blatant ignorance, has prolonged the pandemic and stalled economic recovery. The party of Narcissus, no-knowledge and no-ideas (other than a knee-jerk eagerness to hand over the reins of government to tyrants and oligarchs) is, with pathological compulsion, still willfully oblivious to the needs of ordinary citizens. This absurd ethic obstructs economic recovery.
With equally predatory guile, Republican legislators play upon the economic anxiety of low-information citizens who vote Republican without thinking, who love an empty slogan because it is spoon fed to them, and doesn't require any effort to educate themselves about macroeconomic issues. Witness the Party of Stupid.
Republicans wield power because they can, because they are personality-disordered, because controlling the lives of ordinary citizens gives them an adrenaline rush. Public service? Never crosses their minds. The Party is the pathology.
Republican legislators don't care about their constituents. Their contempt for the citizens they supposedly represent is blatant.