I wish I could say I'm surprised at today's employment report from the Labor Department. I feared the increases in private employment might not reach the levels many economists predicted. What I didn't expect is the reduction in figures for April from 115,000 to just 77,000. As one observer lamented, it looks like the labor market has not yet achieved "escape velocity."
Use of the figures by republicans as a partisan club was perfectly predictable. Since republicans have uniformly opposed every measure democrats have proposed to improve the jobs picture, their complaints fall in the category of the fellow who killed his parents and threw himself on the mercy of the court because he was an orphan.
We didn't need to be in this pickle. We don't have a federal deficit crisis - we have a jobs crisis. Vigorous efforts to use government spending programs to increase aggregate demand and thereby increase opportunities for business could have us back near full employment by now.
The problems in Europe aren't helping.
Paul Krugman explains what is happening.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment