United Liberty
Unemployment rate rises to 9.1%
Fri, 06/03/2011 - 1:28pm | posted by Jason Pye
As has been speculated, the unemployment numbers for May show a slowing job market and an unemployment rate that has increased to 9.1%; according to figures released this morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
The U.S. economy may be in for a prolonged period of soft growth as employers hired the fewest number of workers in eight months in May and the unemployment rate rose to 9.1 percent.
Nonfarm payrolls increased 54,000 last month, the Labor Department said, fewer than the most pessimistic forecast in the Reuters survey and just over a third of what economists had expected.
The employment report which showed broad weakness confirmed the loss of momentum in the economy already flagged by other data from consumer spending to manufacturing, and stoked fears the economy could be facing a more troubling stretch of weakness than had been thought.
“There are plenty of reasons to expect the third quarter will be better. But the question is now becoming how much better?,” said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Economists had pinned the economy’s sluggishness largely on high energy prices, supply chain disruptions stemming from Japan’s earthquake and tornadoes and flooding in the U.S. Midwest and South. The department said it found “no clear impact” from weather on the jobs figures.
The private sector, which has shouldered the burden of job creation added just 83,000 jobs, the least since last June, while government payrolls dropped 29,000.
Adding to the gloomy labor market picture, about 39,000 fewer jobs were created in March and April than previously estimated.
[…]
Payrolls had been expected to rise 150,000, with private employment gaining 175,000.
It’s worth nothing that the unemployment rate is 2.5 points higher than the Obama Administration claimed it would be with the stimulus. And perhaps the most concerning aspect to the economy is the average number of weeks workers spend. It’s been stated before, but here is a chart from Business Insider that puts it in perspective (click to enlarge):
This article is a bit deceptive in that Obama’s predictions on unemployment rates were made before he became President, and were based on assumptions when he was not privy to all the relevant data.
But the stimulus has most certainly created jobs, as virtually all economists agree, and it really takes a willful act of politicized ignorance to keep perpetuating this myth to the contrary. All you have to do is take a look at the monthly trend of the unemployment rate since 2008 to the present to see that it eventually leveled off and then began its downward trend. No economist on the planet is going to blame Obama for the steep rise in unemployment that occurred for nearly two years straight just prior to him stepping foot in office. It had hit 9% within his first six months, before any of Obama’s policies had been put into effect. And remember it was as high as 10.1% his first year and dropped gradually ever since, even dropping below 9% earlier this year. What we’re seeing this month is a typical blip on a gradual, downward trend. Obama’s policies have already created more jobs in two years than Bush created in eight years. And this is an indisputable fact. Anywhere between 2 and 3.6 million jobs have been saved or created thanks to the stimulus. And most of these have been private sector jobs:
http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2011/jun/03/eric-cantor/ca…
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