Just
21,000 jobs created in February.
The U.S. economy added a paltry 21,000 jobs last month, according to a surprisingly weak government report on Friday that turned up the heat on President Bush as he seeks re-election.
The Labor Department report was the latest to dash hopes that employment was following the rest of the economy higher, leaving some economists to warn that robust hiring may still be some way off.
And to add insult to injury:
It also showed job creation in December and January was weaker than previously thought. The count of job gains for January was revised to 97,000 from 112,000 and for December to just 8,000 from 16,000.
But hey, that 8,000 number for December is revised
upward from the original estimate of just 1,000 jobs created. So that's something Bush can slap on his next "feel good" ad.
Kerry was on the ball: "At this rate the Bush administration won't create its first job for another 10 years."
More insult to injury:
The Bush administration released a forecast last month that looked for average growth of about 300,000 jobs a month this year -- well above most private forecasts. But with each disappointing employment report, that projection looks increasingly pie-in-the-sky.
An average of 42,000 jobs have been created over the last three months. The prior three months clocked in at a 79,000 average. And we need 150,000 new jobs every month just to keep pace with population growth.
Furthermore, the average length of unemployment has climbed to 20.3 weeks (over five months!), the longest since January 1984.
Brad DeLong runs with it:
The Bush administration CEA-Treasury-OMB macroeconomic forecast--the one on top of which the administration's budget estimates are built, and that was signed off on and approved by Treasury Secretary Snow, OMB Director Bolten, NEC Chair Friedman, and CEA Chair Mankiw--was put to bed early last December. It was released on February 9. Since then, administration officials have fled from the employment growth component of their own forecast as if it were some ravenous carniverous monster from a horror movie.
It is worth noting that, according to today's February employment release, the pace of payroll job "growth" in America was running 1.07 million behind the pace of the forecast put to bed only two months before. The forecast was already 1,071,000 jobs high the week that it was released.
That's a measure of how out-of-touch the Bush administration's High Politicians are with the state of the American labor market: from their perspective, we've had a million jobs' worth of surprising and unexpected bad employment news since December 2, 2003. For most of the rest of us, the employment news has been about what we expected.
They're not out of touch. The numbers have simply been politicized. They are making up numbers that
look good for electoral purposes, and then hoping fervently that no one notices when they don't hit the targets.
But damn, when they miss their targets by this much, there's no way people won't notice.
