Obama’s View on Jobs May Be a Little Divorced From Reality

Over the weekend President Obama touted a new jobs report. Here are the highlights:

President Obama says the addition of 431,000 jobs in May proves “the economy is getting stronger by the day.”

Mr. Obama used a quick appearance at a suburban Maryland truck company to discuss the Labor Department report showing unemployment dipped to 9.7 percent last month.

He acknowledged that a surge in Census Bureau hiring helped improve the monthly jobs snapshot, a fact that Republicans have used to cast the jobs figures as less positive than they otherwise appear.<!–

The whole speech can be heard below.

The Economist, a left leaning magazine, has a different view on the matter:

EVEN the banner headline figure on today’s payroll employment report is a letdown. Payrolls grew by 431,000 in May, which is the best monthly performance since early in 2000. But economists had been expecting a much larger rise, on the order of 540,000.

That’s just the beginning of the bad news baked into what looks, on its face, like a lovely jobs report. Most of that big figure—fully 411,000 jobs—is attributable to temporary census hiring. The underlying employment trend looks quite weak. Private employment rose by just 41,000 in May, down from an increase of over 200,000 in April. Several sectors, including construction and retail trade, saw outright declines in employment, and the large growth in federal employment associated with the census was partially offset by continued declines in state and local government employment.

Things look even worse in turning to the household survey. There total employment declined by 35,000. The unemployment rate ticked downward to 9.7%, but that was primarily due to a big drop in the size of the labour force—another reversal of recent trends. And the employment-population ratio ticked downward slightly, to 58.7%. Some other troubling trends continued. The number of long-term unemployed workers grew again, and nearly 6.8 million Americans—46% of all unemployed—now fall into that category. Both the mean and median duration of unemployment increased. The median unemployed worker has now been out of a job over 23 weeks, nearly half a year…this report should serve as a reminder that American labaour markets remain very weak, and the outlook for unemployed workers is not at all promising (particulary for the 60% of jobless Americans who have been off the job for more than 15 weeks)…The longer the unemployed stay unemployed, the greater the odds that structural joblessness increases and becomes a persistent drag on economic performance.

So I think we can safely say that President Obama is trying his hardest to shine up this turd called the economy to the best of his ability…:::sigh:::

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