United Liberty
Zero jobs created in August
Fri, 09/02/2011 - 7:52am | posted by Jason Pye
The jobs report for the month of August was released just a few minutes ago by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The news isn’t encouraging:
The US economy created no jobs and the unemployment rate held steadily higher at 9.1 percent in August, fueling concerns that the US is heading for another recession.
It was the first time since World War II that the economy had a net zero jobs created for a month.
Economists had been expecting the report to show a net of 75,000 jobs created, an unusually low number considering the US is technically more than two years removed from the end of the last crisis.
Keep in mind that the employers need to produce around 130,000 jobs just to keep up with population growth, so even the estimates for this month were anemic. The silver lining is, as noted, the unemployment rate didn’t go up.
The report puts even more pressure on President Barack Obama to deliver a strong proposal to Congress to encourage job creation, especially after his stunt of trying to upstage the GOP presidential debate. Odd are, however, that he’ll resort to the same policies that have held the economy back.
This shows once again why we need to get away from austerity, which is killing the European economies as well, and get back to the pro-growth policies of 2009/2010, which took us from the -6% growth of the Bush Administration to +2-3% growth and created over 3 million new jobs. Once we stopped investing in the states and in the economy, and instead started cutting like mad, the new jobs and growth have dwindled down to nothing. Austerity in a time of near-zero demand is a recipe for disaster.
You can call stimulus a “gimmick” if you like, but its track record is much better than that of the Bush tax cuts, which have blown a huge hole in the budget and given us almost no jobs and stagnant wages for the majority of Americans.
At 14 million, the number of unemployed persons was essentially unchanged.
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