By now, you've all heard the good news. It's been on the news everywhere, and the market jumped dramatically. This morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that job growth exceeded everyone's wildest expectations. 243,000 jobs were added, far more than the expectation of 140,000. More importantly, 257,000 private sector jobs were added, while 14,000 government jobs were lost. Unemployment dipped from 8.5% to 8.3%. All of this is very good news. Even those who oppose the president and his methods of handling the economy will not serve themselves to disparage this growth. I certainly won't. What I will say is that the general media is great at reporting headlines, but not digging into the numbers or providing historical context.
The media won't dig in, but others have in order to see what the numbers behind the numbers say, particularly since the CBO's report earlier this week was so lackluster.
The first bit of perspective comes from the Democrats, who spent most of the early 2000's disparaging the job growth of the Bush years as "McJobs". I notice none of them are speaking right now. Which is odd, because while we added about 90,000 very good paying jobs, over 113,000 of the jobs added were clearly "McJobs", or low wage labor. Any job growth is good, so I'm not saying this is a bad thing. I just want to know why "McJobs" were bad 9 years ago, but good now? If any Democrats would like to comment on this, they are more than welcome.
Another bit of news that went overlooked was the surge in part-time and temp work. Again, any job growth is good. I have nothing but good feeling for people who have been out of work but have managed to wrangle a paycheck. But if Obama's goal is "An Economy That Works", I'm sure he didn't mean "Works Temporarily and Part-Time"
A third, though somewhat justified question, is why the BLS has actually increased job growth estimates by a very large amount over the course of 2011. It's possible preliminary numbers were low, but by 23%? Revisions are always needed - by why so many positive adjustments? Usually it's "seasonal fluctuations". Which means...?
Finally, there is the very questionable 1.2mm members of the labor force who suddenly stopped participating. In the BLS' final paragraph, this is discussed:
The adjustment increased the estimated size of the civilian noninstitutional population in December by 1,510,000, the civilian labor force by 258,000, employment by 216,000, unemployment by 42,000, and persons not in the labor force by 1,252,000. Although the total unemployment rate was unaffected, the labor force participation rate and the employment-population ratio were each reduced by 0.3 percentage point. This was because the population increase was primarily among persons 55 and older and, to a lesser degree, persons 16 to 24 years of age. Both these age groups have lower levels of labor force participation than the general population.
Job growth is always a positive. This was a very good report and even ShadowStats shows a falling (though much higher) unemployment rate. But there are still large problems which the media is choosing to not address. One of these remains the labor participation rate, which is near a 40 year low. An economist worth his salt, especially the incorrigible Krugman, knows that it is possible for an economy to reach equilibrium at a level far below its potential capacity. The best we can say about this report is that while it's an improvement, it's far below our typical standards. If a "recovery" is deemed "strong" by the media, Obama faces a better chance of winning. Few here will question why mainstream journalists are not questioning the data. Clearly there is an agenda to be played out. Even Adam Carolla is aware of the existence of media bias.
At least some people realize it's better to embrace other resources than government reports. TrimTabs has spent a great deal of the last few years questioning reports from the government.
