March jobless report misleading
Heralded with much fanfare by President Obama and news pundits was a Bureau of Labor report April 1 announcing that the U.S. Economy had added 216,000 jobs in March, resulting in a jobless rate fall to 8.8 percent. The report was immediately spun, even by those who should know better, as news favorable to Obama’s bid for re-election in November 2012.
A Gallop poll, however, tells a different story. It’s unemployment rate for March came in at 10 percent, little changed from the 10.4 percent unemployment rate a year ago at the end of March.
But what about the underemployment rate? Gallop reports how underemployment fell to 19.3 percent in March of this year from 19.9 percent a month ago.
The March statistics released by the Bureau of Labor and used in calculating the government’s unemployment rate, do not include the millions working temporary jobs, the millions involuntarily working part time because they can’t find full time work, the millions who had been looking for work but not in the last four weeks, the one million who have given up looking for work, or an unknown number of students who haven’t been able to find a job since graduating.
According to Stephen Moore of The Wall Street Journal, “Every state in America today except for two — Indiana and Wisconsin — has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods, almost the exact reversal of the situation in 1960.”
If this trend continues and government agencies keep hiring more and more workers, a decrease in unemployment rates could prove a drag on the economy.
Why: Because public sector workers impose on state and local governments — paid by taxpayers — huge expenditures to pay for their benefits.
Job creation continues be front and center in the Obama administration and in the minds of the public. For meaningful job creation to occur, it must happen in the private sector, where people create things, in contrast to the public sector, where people take things.
Nancy J. Thorner
Lake Bluff