Ezra Klein?@ezraklein

Revisions mixed: April down by 11k, May up by 8k.

So....the SCLMB (so-called liberal media bias) claims that GAINING 80,000 new jobs is a "dismal" jobs report, forgetting of course the fact that under Bush we were losing 750,000 jobs a MONTH. You see in the real world, when you GAIN more jobs than you lose that is a GOOD thing, a good jobs report, not great one but considering how the republic party is doing it's best to DESTROY this country for political reasons, that ain't too shabby in my book

so 80,000 created means a net of negative 40K. Plus most of the new jobs being created are bottom of the barrel in terms of pay. 95% of the jobs lost in the last 4 years have been middle class or higher in terms of pay.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-05-01/obamas-middle-class-problem-job-losses

Obama's Middle Class Problem: Deeper Job Losses

Barack Obama campaigned four years ago assailing President George W. Bush for wage losses suffered by the middle class. More than three years into Obama’s own presidency, those declines have only deepened. Hans Nichols reports on Bloomberg Television's "In The Loop."

----------------------------

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-03/the-recovery-squeezes-the-middle-class/

Ninety-five percent of the net job losses during the recession were in middle-skill occupations such as office workers, bank tellers, and machine operators, according to research by economists Nir Jaimovich of Duke University and Henry Siu of the University of British Columbia. That’s what we all assume happens in recessions: The middle class is hit hardest, then eventually climbs back. Only, that comeback isn’t happening. Job growth since the end of the recession has been clustered in high-skill fields inaccessible to workers without advanced degrees or in low-paying industries, the economists found.

In March the U.S. had 2 million more managers and professionals working than five years earlier. Lower-paying service-sector jobs were up 1.5 million. It’s the middle-income jobs that have been slow to return. Over the same period, there were 3.2 million fewer Americans working in sales and office jobs and 1.2 million fewer employed in transportation and production—a broad category that includes factory and assembly-line workers, printers, welders, tailors, and poultry and meat plant workers. Another worrisome measurement: Median annual household income in March was $2,900 lower after inflation than at the start of the recovery in June 2009, according to Sentier Research, an economic consulting firm.

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Romney will be even more of a disaster, if he someone slithers his way into office.

Then the unemployment rate was 4.5% and when job creation was 100k it was dismal. A jobs report of only 75k new jobs caused the stock market to take a nosedive. We compared the job creation numbers with what was either good or what was needed.

We couldn't get past the fact that we needed 200k new jobs a month to keep up with population growth. We were irate that the unemployment rate was only 4.5% and that the recovery from the recession we had after the tech bubble burst and the stock market tanked had taken 3 years to get us back to the historically very low unemployment rates.

Now we chortle that the private sector jobs are back up to where they were on inauguration day, instead of what they were before the recession. Some exult in 80k/month job creation because, well, it could be worse. Instead of saying, "Let's compare this with where it needs to be, which is usual, let's compare it with how bad it could be." Nice change of standards, and not a particularly useful one in terms of economics.

hen again, it still annoys me that we focus on the first derivative of the unemployment curve (net job creation/loss) rather than the unemployment curve itself. The one points out when job lost was happening at its highest rate--the last month or two of * and the first month or two of Obama--and while it's a nice inflection point, it's not when the unemployment situation actually reversed.

and purposefully holding back in order to fulfill GOP leader gasbag Limpball's "I hope he fails".

home to roost, all passed under Clinton. The USA has utterly hollowed out its industrial manufacturing base (87% gone off-shore since 1965 due to the madness that is absolute advantage modeled capitalism, as opposed to comparative advantage). These hammer blows, combined with the ascendancy of the bankster/gangsters are major taproots in the tree of bitter economic fruit now in full bloom.

and there would be a decent job picture now.

Sometimes, I just don't know why some folks really worship the guy.

that was at or near the bottom in every statistical category. Clinton is the corporate democrat sought by the powers who run this country.

states that cannot provide a decent life for a significant minority of their people. It's also a state that gets back
more from the federal government than it pays in.

It's time for a president with gumption to equalize the federal/state money equation and I would like to see military
bases, or major functions of same, moved out of the south and into states that have proven they can pay their own way.

passed under Clinton, as was NAFTA, and NAFTA contains the Multi-lateral Agreement on Investments. The MAI framework is contained in the current Trans-Pacific Partnership being negotiated in secret and pushed by Obama. In short, we're screwed unless we take to the streets and fight back against global capitalism.

nt

n/t

That is commonly cited and it is not a rule that can be defended statistically. First of all there are far too few observations (ie Presidents standing for re-election). Second, the "rule" is crafted by using the % when Reagan was up for re-election. If this was a real causal relationship, you would have expected as Reagan just made it down to that level that he would have pulled off a squeaker. He didn't - it was a pretty massive landslide. Ask any Republican citing this faux wisdom if Reagan would have lost if that number were a few tenths of a point higher.

This is NOT denying that a bad economy and high unemployment will hurt an incumbent President, just saying that the simplistic rule - crafted from the data means very little.

I have the paper sitting on my desk right in front of me. Disclaimer: I fished it from a trash can at the Metrobus transfer point at the Pentagon this morning. So, don't thank me; thank the military-industrial complex for this random act of kindness. Anyway....

I see the online version of the article is available for subscribers only. You can email the author, Spencer Jakab, at tape@wsj.com. Online, you can add comments too.

I hope this helps. Thanks for posting.

You can read full WSJ articles.

Last edited Fri Jul 6, 2012, 04:38 PM - Edit history (1)

The WSJ likely knows better.

My concern was that many people would take the "rule" as something that would make them think Obama's reelection chances were low. Before trying to explain why the CW is flaky, I searched Daily Kos and DU2 to see if I could find a good explanation - and found one with much more detail than I hoped for.

Here is a link - http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/03/981672/-Unemployment-rate-does-not-necessarily-predict-re-election-chances

You don't need to apologize. I enjoyed your post. I did not consider an attack at all.

Please enjoy the weekend.

to do QE3. They simply are not bad enough. You basically have one more month to go if the Fed is going to do any injections, as waiting until September is not an option due to the closeness of the November elections. Expect the Repugs to kick up a huge protest if the the Fed even does anything in August, as they will scream that Bernanke is thus playing politics.

The best hope is that the July, August, and September employment numbers come in strong, but with the global fiscal crisis still in full effect, I am not holding my breath. TBH, it is totally in my own self-interest for the Fed to do QE3, as this will boost gold, silver, and other commodities higher (a large part of my portfolio).

and there is less competition for existing jobs

This was a miss by 20% to the downside (expected number was 100,000, and it came in at 80,000). The August number will have a higher expectation, so you will have to have even greater jobs created to beat it.

Also the EU situation here is getting worse and worse, and after the summer holiday season ends in Agust, I fully expect to see some real nasty events. Just days after the latest 'BIG PLAN' of salvation was announced, take a look at Spanish bond spreads. They are blowing up. Italy is in near collapse, and Greece is starting to teeter towards open limited civil war. The EU is the biggest trading partner of the US, not China, not Canada, so events there really matter.

and if those expectations are not met, people will care for about a news cycle,

Then, the higher numbers will be in August and September, which will be compared to the lower #s of the Summer, and the graph will show slow but sustained job growth.

It doesn't solve the immediate problems faced by the unemployed, but it doesn't spell doom for Obama either.

No President since the great Depression has been re-elected with unemployment above 7.2%? Well no President Since Roosevelt has had to face as great an economic challenge during an election year.

Obama is starting to hit Romney hard on outsourcing. what he needs to do now is go to the American people and say "Give me a Congress that will pass a damn Jobs Bill!" Really lay it on. Go full on Truman on these guys.

Truman defeats Dewey and the Do Nothing 80th Congress. That's the election tactic Obama should be following.

Does anyone have the answer to that question? What has caused the collapse over there?

1. The Euro was doomed from the beginning. You cannot have a single currency with 17 different fiscal policies and a myriad number of underlying macroeconomic subsystems. What works for one country will many times be a poison pill for another. IMHO it was designed to eventually fail to force political unification, aka the stripping of the individual nation-states sovereignty.

2. Massive systemic control fraud by the top 10 or so banks, who lied and cooked books to get nations like Greece into the Eurozone. These banksters then bet against the very nations they had set up to fail.

3. The inability for individual nations to print money, thus hamstringing the nations' abilities to expand and contract money supply as tailored to their own economic situation. Only the ECB can do this, and Germany basically runs the ECB. They have a hard-wired fear of inflation, dating back to the Wiemar hyperinflation of the mid 1920's.

4. Sustained, coordinated attacks by both the banks and the hedge fund hyenas on the individual nations bond markets. They can bring a nation like Greece or Portugal to its knees in just a few days via large increases in the cost of borrowing. In addition there was a tremendous amount of corruption in many of the southern EU countries, that led to traditional financial woes as well. This is drastically overplayed in the financial press, however.

5. The utter insistence that PRIVATE bank losses be NATIONALIZED and dumped onto the backs of the citizens. This huge debt transfer is then used as the principal rationale behind the calls for drastic austerity. This austerity then creates a negative feedback loop where the economies contract, thus bring in ever decreasing revenues to the national governments. Then the crisis is started all over again. Public infrastructure and public lands and resources are then snapped up at bargain-basement prices by the banksters.

Neo-feudalism, driven by corporate bankster fascism thus ensues. Eventually even the US (who escapes the immediate wrath by the Fed's ability to print trillions of dollars and still have the globe flee into its arms of dollars and debt) will succumb to this death spiral as well.

The other main thing (EU fear being the first) that is propping up the US dollar is that 87% of all global transactions (including the big one- oil) are still denominated in dollars. This creates a constant demand for more and more dollars, and allows the US to rack up trillions upon trillion in public debts that any other nation would have long ago went bankrupt from. This ponzi scheme is enforced by one main thing, the US military. This gunboat banking schema is the reason for 95% of the empiric wars that America is engaged in.

Saddam Hussein and Qaddafi were murderous despots, but both were supported with billions of US taxpayer-funded dollars until they each attempted to trade oil in non-dollar denominated methods or tried to nationalize their oil fields. At that point, the 'shock-and-awe' embrace of US death dealing began in earnest. The major nation now trading oil in non dollar ways is Iran. Thus the war drums beat for mullah blood.

When will the American people wake up and vote for traditional Democratic values? Republican and Third Way policies can lead to no other outcome but this.

socialism was a contributing factor of Europe's collapse.

At some point, paying for so many freebies will become unstustainable, will it not? Seems like there should be a middleground between a welfare mentality and austerity.

In fact, the most socialistic countries, such as Northern Europe, Germany, and France, are doing pretty well. But the countries which, five years ago, were hailed by Bankers, Republicans and Third Way as models of how "responsible adult" economies should work, like Ireland and Spain, are getting crushed. Iceland was also a poster child for being a "responsible adult" economy, and it got crushed, but instead of austerity it put some bankers in jail and told the others to screw, and now it's doing well. Greece is another story, it genuinely had structural issues IIRC.

Leveraging, Deleveraging, and Fiscal Policy
Those Revolting Europeans
European Crisis Realities
Greece as Victim

The other big problem in Europe is that countries can't print their own money (only the EU can as a whole), but that's technical.

In general, if one doesn't have time to do the research, it's pretty safe to assume that anything that Republicans or the Third Way says is 100% wrong.

time the BLS dramatically UNDERSTATES the true level of unemployment. Win some, lose some when it comes to BLS BS.

The question was about Jobs...BLS's Current Employment Statistics Survey. Which has nothing to do with the Unemployment rate which comes from a completely different survey.

And no, BLS does not dramatically understate unemployment. The only people who say that are using ridiculous or subjective or ridiculously subjective definitions of unemployment.

The models are not perfect, of course, but no model is. They're not extremely flawed, though.

You cut and paste someone else's post from a different forum. Which required almost no effort on your part. But to debunk it (because almost everything claimed is wrong) I'd have to spend a lot of time and effort addressing each point.

But ok, let's do some highlights off the top of my head without research:

ADP uses Admin data for its clients and only its clients.
BLS uses a sample survey for all business that contribute to UI taxes (including the government).

The numbers almost never match up, but BLS has the better picture because it includes more businesses.

Many fiscal budgets run July to June - the State of Pennsylvania and the public school districts in Pa had to pass budgets in June.

Budget cuts over the last two years by the republican governor and state legislature have forced universities and public schools to cut jobs like mad. There is one central pennsylvania school district that layed off 70 people in June. Not all districts are that bad, some aren't making any cuts, but there are 500 school districts, and it adds up. Some of the state universities are some of the bigger employers in the state and this years state budget cuts 30% from their funding.

What they have done to the USPS ...

It is callous, it is intentional, and if we had ANYTHING approaching the LIBERAL MEDIA these jerkoffs scream about, the republicans would be evicerated for what they have done the last few years - all in the sake of the hubris of trying to destroy a president with the added benefit of driving the privatization that allows their donors to raid the tax payer piggy banks.

A little too late though. Ha!

Over 100,000 teachers have been laid off in the last year. And the red state governors have been all about that.


http://www.businessinsider.com/over-100000-local-teaching-jobs-have-been-lost-in-the-last-year-2012-7

Corbett and the R state legislature/senate have forced thousands of lost jobs at public schools and universities alone.

add in the USPS ...

A VERY concerted, and callous, effort to destroy the president.

Sadly, there are people (of their family or friends) who have lost their jobs for this reason alone who are going to blame President Obama and somehow use their losing their jobs to deranged GOP hubris as a means to blame the evil liberal boogyman and further entrench their "conservatism."

There was a bit of a political war waged.

There's only so many places to cut funding. Most of the TX budget is health care and education. Remove 100% of what's left and you'd have eliminated half the predicted budget shortall.

There was a large rainy day fund from oil revenues. Use it or not? Most on the left said use every penny, the "hope" position; those closer to the center said "use half", the "hope, but maybe not so much" position; those on the right said, "Things could get worse, save it."

That left cutting services or raising taxes. Obama, when he was running for office, was right in saying you don't raise taxes in a recession. It was pretty much standard far until 2009, when all of a sudden a lot of people said that's what was needed--raising a taxes in a recession. (Why, Clinton raised taxes a mere 2 years after a recession!) I don't think most Texans wanted a tax increase anyway.

They cut Medicaid, education, and pretty much everything else. When updated revenue numbers came in a month or two later some cuts were reversed before they were fully implemented and schools hired more teachers (sometimes rehiring teachers they let go). A big hunk of the increased revenue was from oil industry fees.

(This actually pretty much screwed public science education: Suddenly all TX students need 4 years of science and the science standards were boosted in preparation for a more rigorous standardized test being phased in last year and then next two years. At the same time that they needed to hire more science teachers and buy equipment hand over fist they cut budgets. Argh.)

Over 300M people and this is all the job creation we can muster????

Leaving aside IBD's slanted headline, this doesn't look good either.

More workers joined the federal government's disability program in June than got new jobs, according to two new government reports, a clear indicator of how bleak the nation's jobs picture is after three full years of economic recovery.

The economy created just 80,000 jobs in June, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. But that same month, 85,000 workers left the workforce entirely to enroll in the Social Security Disability Insurance program, according to the Social Security Administration.

The disability ranks have outpaced job growth throughout President Obama's economic recovery. While the economy has created 2.6 million jobs since June 2009, fully 3.1 million workers signed up for disability benefits.

In other words, the number of new disability enrollees has climbed 19% faster than the number of new jobs created during the sluggish recovery.

And attack the President in this one. Not fooled.

The same source who claimed Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance under the British Health Care system. Hawking has always lived in Britain.


Again, not fooled.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Social Security Administration are RW sources?

Did you even read the article?

He suggested, in O'Reilly's special way, that these disability enrollees are scamming the system.

Of course, no discussion was offered regarding the fact that we have an aging workforce, and the fact that the ACA has not kicked in yet, so chronic medical problems for which people cannot get treatment in ERs, like back pain and diabetes, are rendering them disabled. And when there are no jobs to be had even when you are able-bodied, enrolling in the SSDI program is the only way these folks can survive.

And they even post it here.

4.4 million added to private rolls in that time.

Upward trend, folks. Upward. For 28 straight months.

The stat that says it all is total employment.

It's down by 5 million since 2008. Not up.

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001

of those. 4.4 million in the private sector since early '10, while - at the same time - eliminating a bunch of public sector jobs.

We're climbing out of this hole, slow and steady, but climbing. While US companies are sitting on record amount of cash ($2 trillion by some estimates) and some sectors having record profits.

It's far better than '00 to '10.

Remember "Recovery Summer"?

That was proclaimed in 2010. Millions of jobless are still waiting.

If the labor force was the same size as when Obama took office—65.7% then vs. 63.8% today—the current U-3 unemployment rate would be 10.9%. Do you understand what those numbers mean? They've been artificially adjusted due to an assumption by statisticians that if you haven't been working for a long time, you're no longer interested in working. You buy that?

The U-6 unemployment rate, which includes “all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons,” is 14.9%, which is up from May. That's the real unemployment rate. 1 in 6 who could be working are not.

I don't play the blame game. I look at the numbers. We are all to blame, for obvious reasons. Obama didn't create this mess, and he cannot fix it.

We are currently in the longest streak - 41 months - of unemployment of 8% or higher since the Great Depression. In 2009, Obama's economic team, in an effort to get the stimulus bill passed, predicted "with high confidence" that after the stimulus plan, the unemployment rate would be around 5.6% today. The pugs are going to go to town on that.

The following is from a ZeroHedge article. These are the numbers you want to consider. If you aren't familiar with that site, I suggest you fix that soon.

* Total Nonfarm Payrolls have decreased by -1.3 million from December 2008 (134,379K) to June 2012 (133,088); Source: St. Louis Fed

* Full-time jobs based on the Household Survey, have decreased by 2.5 million from 117,039K to 114,573K; Source: Table A.9, BLS

* Part-time jobs based on the Household Survey, have increased by 1.6 million from 26,3187 to 27,894K; Source: Table A.9, BLS

* Foodstamps recipients have increased by 14.6 million from 31.567 million to 46,187 (as of April 2012); Source: USDA

* Disability recipients have increased by 1.3 million from 7.427 million to 8.733 million; Source: Social Security Administration

Full article: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/economic-quality-scorecard-obama-administration

Look at this graph.



Look at each trendline in that graph. Millions fewer jobs since 2009, and millions more people since 2009, fighting for what's out there. 15 million new foodstamp recipients since 2009, while U-3 has risen to 15%. I don't see a light at the end of the tunnel. In my opinion, it's not helping the Democratic Party's electoral prospects pretending otherwise.

As for your assertion that "it's far better than '00 to '10", do you know what the unemployment rate was in each of those years?

2000 4.0
2001 4.7
2002 5.8
2003 6.0
2004 5.5
2005 5.1
2006 4.6
2007 4.6
2008 5.8
2009 9.3
2010 9.6

Source: BLS

I suggest not calling too much attention to those numbers.

We are going to have a real political Battle Royale this fall. The voters want to elect people they can trust. Everyone can see how shitty the job market is, how beat up real-estate is, how many dead zones there are in commercial districts, and how many government entities are in debt to their eyeballs and barely able to pay bills.

When political messages conflict with their own lyin' eyes, voters are going to believe what their own lyin' eyes tell them, and not what the flim-flam men tell them.

At least we are barely treading water, which is a long way from where we were in '08 and '09. The policies that created this clusterfuck are the ones we are shedding, though much, much slower that I'd like to see (and the stimulus was nowhere near what it should have been, which might have taken us down to a 6 percent recorded unemployment number).

What I am saying is it is a slow, tough slog, but why go back to the policies that created this mess? And it could be much, much worse. And if Mittens and enough of his kind are elected, it will be.

The economy is clearly sick and stagnant, unemployment is on everyone's mind, and few people feel like things have improved much in the last 3 1/2 years.

As I see it, the election will turn on who can credibly offer a way forward. The Democratic Party message needs to present clearly graspable, clearly credible plans for restarting the economy. People's tolerance for political bullshit is at a low point.

Things really ARE that bad, and could very well worsen soon, given the slow-motion train wreck in Europe. A successful message must acknowledge that. Voters want a voice that can be trusted to say it like it is, rather than what some focus-group-based consultant says.

If the Party doesn't get rid of the bullshit, then just enough people might say what the hell, could Rmoney be any worse?

That's why I remind those interested in keeping a D in the White House that putting a petticoat on a pig does not change the fact that it's a pig. The numbers are our friend, if we speak about them honestly, and use them to craft a credible economic strategy.

By the way, I appreciate your civility, whether or not we have identical views. I know we want the same outcome.

... about how cynical people are about the messaging (I really never thought it could get worse than it did in the '80s, then came the '90s and now ...).

What frustrates me is the fact the we are treading water - just barely, but still treading - and have been doing so and sometimes a bit better for over two years now as opposed shedding jobs and the nobody is saying so. And all this while actually cutting public employment.

*If* public sector employment held steady or even added a few jobs, where would the numbers be?

*If* we had enacted a real stimulus bill, where would the numbers (and the highways, power plants, schools, damns, etc.) be?

*That* is what I think Dems should be talking about. Given the handicapping by the Republicans in Congress, timidity (IMO) by Obama in certain areas and the lapdog mainstream media, that we are slowly moving forward is kind of amazing.

What is really amazing is while my views really haven't changed since the '80s when I think I would have been considered a moderate Democrat or left-leaning Indy, I think I am now considered a raging socialist (or communist, whatever is more inflammatory).

And, while I appreciate your comment, your responses have been much more civil than mine and I will strive toward that. Thanks.

When will we stop following these disastrous GOP ideas that simply do not work no matter what economy they're applied to around the globe?!?!

Looking at median household income declines makes the job picture over the past couple of decades look even worse.

What worries me the most is the fact that formerly decent paying work is now being advertised at wages 20 to 30% lower than offered as late as 2006/2007.

In my area the auto plants and auto suppliers are starting to hire.

Nissan hired around 1200 people which is good news however the majority were hired through a job service at 11 to 12 dollars an hour. They did hire some people directly and the pay was in the 15 dollar an hour range while the workers there now are making 18 to 20.

GM Spring Hill is hiring new production workers at 15.30 an hour while the recalled workers are well over 20/hr.

The Bridgestone tire factory is hiring new workers at an advertised wage of 13.80 an hour while their other workers were making 22 to 24 dollars an hour.

V.W. is hiring and they pay 16 to 17 dollars an hour.

Now we move on to the auto suppliers. 12 to 14 dollars an hour seems to be the norm for "first tier" suppliers. You move on to the second tier suppliers and I have seen wages advertised as low as 8 dollars an hour.

Job growth has been terrible over the past ten years and the jobs being created are paying less. It doesn't make for a very solid economy when prices are rising (food, fuel) and wages declining. I think people compensated for low pay with credit but that has to end eventually.

The funny thing is people want to "blame" President Obama when this has been a long term trend brought on by past political decisions made by both parties.

is proof that we kinda lie with that statistic.

We really ought to shift over to using exclusively the percentage of working age individuals who are employed. That will always be a more honest number and a better gauge of how things are going.