The "Disappointing" Jobs Report for last month has become the new media monster meme, with multiple parties doing their best to make it eclipse the great success of the Democratic National Convention. The liberal NY Times headlines "Jobs Gains Slow, Posing Problems for Obama's Bid" next to an "analysis" echoing that just after the Convention, Obama is "on the defensive" because of the jobs report.
The liberal NPR's morning edition did not mention "jobs report" without preceding it with "disappointing."
Last night, David Simon, creator of The Wire and Treme was on Bill Maher and called bullshit on this:
The industrialization's been going on for 50 years, the decline of organized labor's been going on for 40 years, globalization: 20-25 years, and you're gonna sit there and argue over this month's employment report? The fact that we can't have an adult electoral process is rooted in this kind of frenzy of who can we blame, and how fast.
That business of four years being the metric for anything? We have a political culture that everyone plants annuals, they plant pretty flowers that come up the next spring. What we need is a political culture where somebody plants a fuckin' olive tree, which doesn't even give you an olive for seven years. That's how you fix an economy...When that olive tree becomes an orchard.
As Romney is out there gleefully echoing this, buried somewhere in some papers or NPR is some mention that this is the year's anniversary of the Republicans blocking Obama's Jobs Act.
Krugman today notes a report by Macroeconomics Advisors that the "the American Jobs Act (AJA), if enacted, would give a significant boost to GDP and employment over the near-term, and."
-The various tax cuts aimed at raising workers’ after-tax income and encouraging hiring and investing, combined with the spending increases aimed at maintaining state & local employment and funding infrastructure modernization, would:
-Boost the level of GDP by 1.3% by the end of 2012, and by 0.2% by the end of 2013.
-Raise nonfarm establishment employment by 1.3 million by the end of 2012 and 0.8 million by the end of 2013, relative to the baseline
The monthly jobs report has been inflated into an out-of-context Holy Grail, without reference to the 800,000 jobs per month being lost in 2008-2009, or the long-term historical forces that Simon notes.
Democratic politicians and blogs need to fight against this by constantly comparing these numbers to four years ago and their relationship to the blocking of the Jobs Act.