The US economy added only 18,000 jobs in June, and the unemployment rate rose to 9.2%. 39,000 jobs were lost in the public sector.
Yeah, but did anyone count my Etsy business in those numbers? I think we need to recalculate, people.
UPDATE: That was a joke, BTW.
A run down of commentary at the Daily Dish.
Apt. 11d 
My employer is delaying most raises by six months and making them shitty raises anyway.
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I am going to keep working here in Ghana. The economy here is growing quite robustly. This might be the only history department aiming to double its full time faculty in a year.
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That is one disastrous jobs report. I know that most People Like Us have jobs–that wasn’t true for a while two years ago–but clearly there is massive suffering elsewhere.
To those with open minds, it suggests that Obamanomics isn’t working that well, compared to Reaganomics. To those with ideological blinders, I guess it proves that we need to keep doing what we have been doing, only harder.
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I didn’t have the time to write a proper post on this topic today.
y81, but your reaction ideological, too. The stimulus may have helped things from getting worse. But really, you don’t know and I don’t know. The smartest economic minds in the country don’t know.
There’s a whole group of people that are in serious trouble and I don’t see how things are going to get better for them. I seriously doubt that tax breaks for the rich will mean that my brother in law will be able to pay his phone bill. I’ve got to do shit tonight, but if I have time, I’ll write a better post, so people can debate.
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“I seriously doubt that tax breaks for the rich will mean that my brother in law will be able to pay his phone bill.”
Maybe not directly, but how can the economy recover when the current administration has such a pattern of picking winners and losers in the economy (green jobs–good! oil industry–bad! GM–good! Boeing move–bad!), spending tremendous amounts of money to delay the inevitable (the $8k housing credit that has now trapped a lot of unwary first time buyers into homes they can’t sell), and creating uncertainty about business climate? Half the time, Obama’s administration is climbing in bed with various favored industries (banking, “green jobs”, housing, anything with lots of union workers, high speed rail). The other half of the time, they’re beating on their favorite whipping boys (oil, coal, jets, doctors, etc.). It’s a very unpredictable environment, particularly given ongoing changes in health insurance law and the federal governments’ dangerous fiscal situation and insatiable appetite for revenue. Business people have to believe that 1) there will be an even playing field 2) the government is a referee, not a player 3) the rules of the game are fixed and 4) if they make money, they’ll be able to keep at least half of it.
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We spend so much money on mutually contradictory goals. Coal is bad, but electric cars are good, so the feds subsidize electric cars that run on electricity derived from coal. Likewise, the federal government created the massive infrastructure of the FHA and VA and HUD and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make housing affordable (not sure how all of those agencies nest together). Decades later, it turns out that we are praying that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will keep housing prices from falling. This doesn’t make any sense, that the agencies are expected to both make housing more expensive and more affordable. Can we stop doing this stuff?
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The hypocrisy of the Republicans on this issue knows no bounds. The job loss numbers are so bad because so many public employees have been laid off! The same bozos who opposed the stimulus–which hired lots of those people–are now bemoaning the unemployment figures when those workers are being laid off. I’ve got an idea! Let’s hire them back. That would lower unemployment and help the economy. But the Republicans are against doing that. They oppose the one thing government CAN do to lower unempoyment AND stimulate the economy. Clearly, they don’t care about job loss. What a shame.
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Except…we still DO have Reagonomics. This isn’t a recession/depression for the rich, it’s for those in the bottom 4/5ths. It turns out the greed of those at the top is insatiable, and throwing money at them in hopes that they share some with us isn’t working.
The funny thing is, China is getting a clue and is turning full steam to creating a social safety net and environmental protection. China has serious problems, but it turns out having nuclear physicists run your country might be a better thing than getting lawyers (or actors) to.
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Anybody worried about Reps vs Dems missed how bipartisan the real thefts have been.
BTW, China is dismantling its old state-employer safety net far faster then it is building a new one.
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I listened to the Wall Street Journal for Friday audio edition Sunday. It was somewhat nausea-inducing to listen to the forecasts for a stellar jobs report with the sinking feeling of hindsight….
China’s a weird and interesting case. The technocrats know full well that peasant discontent could topple this regime just as the old one was. Yet the effort seems to be more in raising the lower end than in decreasing income disparity. And I have no read on what the party opinion on “migrant workers” (really, those who moved outside of their residency registration) might be.
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