This morning’s December employment report was qualified good news, at best.
To be sure, any time the economy is adding jobs is a good thing, and with 200,000 non-farm payroll jobs created, pushing the unemployment rate to 8.5 percent, it would be foolish not to welcome some good news. Things are headed the right direction – but at a snail’s pace. Of course, since Houston and Texas know how to do things right, things are looking pretty good on the local level as well, as this piece by the Houston Business Journal indicates.
Still, at the national level, it’s like airplane struggling to gain altitude as a mountain approaches. Sure – that extra 1,000 feet of altitude pushing the plane to 3,000 feet is good, – but how are we going to get over that 21,000-foot mountain range?
That’s the basic question that faces the federal government and struggling businesses as the economy fights to emerge from a crushing loss of jobs from the recession. As this Wall Street Journal piece points out, total nonfarm payrolls stood at 131.9 million last month – far short of regaining the 8.8 million jobs wiped out by the recession.
And even worse, with the government looking at raising the federal debt limit to an astounding $16 trillion, the ill-conceived attempts at stimulus apparently did little but ring up the nation’s credit card – laying a huge burden on the economy.
The problem, as expressed by U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady, R-The Woodlands, and voices such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s chief economist, is that government policy – wasteful spending, and crushing regulation – are inhibiting, not helping, this recovery.
And even with the jobs being added, a closer look at the positive spin by some on the numbers the masks a depressing point – the job growth is not as strong as one might think.
First, about 40,000 of those 200,000 new jobs were temporary courier and delivery jobs associated with the upswing in deliveries around the Christmas season. They will disappear by next month’s report.
Furthermore, because the government’s statistics don’t count those who have stopped looking for work, the real unemployment number looks more like a dispiriting 11.6 percent, as pointed out by Rep. Brady in a release today.
“As we enter the fourth year of the Obama presidency, job prospects remain so poor that many American workers have lost hope of finding work and have stopped looking,” Brady stated. “If the percentage of Americans employed or looking for work at the beginning of the recession in December 2007 not declined, the unemployment rate would have been 11.6 percent in today’s report instead of 8.5 percent.”
That means the economy will remain the key focus of this presidential election. And as Brady and the chamber both point out – this administration continues to be wrong on economic policy.
According to a statement by U.S. Chamber of Commerce Chief Economist Dr. Martin Regalia, released today: “The focus this year has to continue to be on improving the underlying growth in the economy because that is what will create jobs.
“Leaders in Washington must work together to remove impediments to growth and job creation by investing in infrastructure to rebuild our crumbling roads and bridges, increasing domestic energy, speeding up the permitting process so projects can get underway more quickly and remove other regulatory barriers that are weighing down the economy, approving the Keystone Pipeline permit, passing the intellectual property bills to protect jobs, and making American business more globally competitive by acting on comprehensive tax reform.”
So enjoy the good news – and steel yourself for the bad news: there is a mountain range ahead, and we’ve going to have to dump a lot of cargo – a.k.a. bad policy and wasteful, or at least non-essential, federal spending – if we want to clear it.
jimfredricks 