Joblessness
Economic recovery slow to nonexistent President Barack Obama and the country were hoping for a little good economic news going into the July Fourth weekend. They didn’t get it.
True, the June unemployment rate dropped from 9.7 percent to 9.5 percent, the lowest since last July, but that’s a misleading figure. It’s only lower because 652,000 people quit looking for work altogether and thus aren’t counted as part of the work force.
Total payroll fell by 125,000 jobs, driven largely by 225,000 temporary Census jobs coming to an end. If there is a small ray of light, the private sector added 83,000 jobs, the sixth straight month of gains, but the economy has to create 100,000 jobs a month just to stay even.
Other key indicators – factory orders, home sales, construction spending, consumer confidence, the market indices – were down. The average workweek was slightly shorter and the average hourly wage down 2 cents to $22.53.
The underemployment rate, which perhaps comes closest to how people feel about their job prospects, fell slightly in June to 16.5 percent from 16.6 percent the month before. That counts those looking for work, those who have given up looking and those with part-time jobs who want to work fulltime.
And a lot of jobless workers are about to have the safety net yanked out from under them. Before Congress went home for the Independence Day recess, Senate Republicans blocked an extension of unemployment benefits, leaving 1.3 million people without aid. Unless the Republicans relent, that number will grow to 3.3 million by the end of the month.
Republicans claim to be concerned about adding to the federal deficit, something that didn’t bother them all the years they were adding to it. The Obama administration says the spending is a necessary evil, that the economy is not far enough along in its recovery to forgo stimulus spending. It all depends very much on what the lawmakers hear over the recess.
Meanwhile, the economic consensus is that a sustainable recovery is under way and that there will not be a double-dip recession, but that a full recovery will be a long, slow grind.
Scripps Howard News Service