Jobs Report Is Bleak News for Democratsby Publius
From the Associated Press:
The die is cast, and it’s grim news for the Democrats. There’s nothing now that Congress or President Barack Obama can do to before the November midterm elections to jolt the nation’s stagnant economy.
Friday’s government report—the last major economic news before the midterm elections—showed the nation continued to lose jobs last month, reinforcing the bleak reality that it probably will be years—not months—before employment returns to pre-recession levels below 6 percent.
That tightens the pressure on Democrats ahead of the Nov. 2 elections. And it also casts a dark shadow well into the 2012 election season and beyond.
“We won’t see under 6 percent for five years,” David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor’s in New York, said Friday after the Labor Department reported that 95,000 more jobs were lost in September and the unemployment rate held at 9.6 percent. “It’s going to be a slow recovery.”
Democrats, who now control the White House and both chambers of Congress, are sticking with a positive line: The economy is moving too slowly for anybody’s comfort, but Obama and his congressional Democratic allies have laid the groundwork for future prosperity. They are blaming the downturn on the policies of Republican George W. Bush’s eight-year presidency.
Republicans, meanwhile, were quick to say Friday’s new jobless report only underscored the weakness of Democratic policies of big government and taxes. It represented “the final verdict on the failed policies of this White House and Democratic Congress as voters head to the polls,” said GOP party chief Michael Steele.
Unemployment has now topped 9.5 percent for 14 months in a row, the longest stretch since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Congress, meanwhile, has left town until after the midterms, failing to decide what to do about wide-ranging Bush-era tax cuts that are due to expire on Jan. 1. Uncertainty over those tax cuts itself is contributing to the lack of hiring as businesses, especially small ones, attempt to figure out what their tax burdens will be next year.
Read the whole thing here.
From Breitbart:
Analysis: Jobs report is bleak news for Democrats
Oct 8 10:40 AM US/Eastern
By TOM RAUM
Associated Press Writer
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In this Oct. 5, 2010 photograph, job seekers browse through information...
Graphic charts monthly unemployment rate for the past 13 months
WASHINGTON (AP) - The die is cast, and it's grim news for the Democrats. There's nothing now that Congress or President Barack Obama can do to before the November midterm elections to jolt the nation's stagnant economy.
Friday's government report—the last major economic news before the midterm elections—showed the nation continued to lose jobs last month, reinforcing the bleak reality that it probably will be years—not months—before employment returns to pre-recession levels below 6 percent.
That tightens the pressure on Democrats ahead of the Nov. 2 elections. And it also casts a dark shadow well into the 2012 election season and beyond.
"We won't see under 6 percent for five years," David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's in New York, said Friday after the Labor Department reported that 95,000 more jobs were lost in September and the unemployment rate held at 9.6 percent. "It's going to be a slow recovery."
Democrats, who now control the White House and both chambers of Congress, are sticking with a positive line: The economy is moving too slowly for anybody's comfort, but Obama and his congressional Democratic allies have laid the groundwork for future prosperity. They are blaming the downturn on the policies of Republican George W. Bush's eight-year presidency.
Republicans, meanwhile, were quick to say Friday's new jobless report only underscored the weakness of Democratic policies of big government and taxes. It represented "the final verdict on the failed policies of this White House and Democratic Congress as voters head to the polls," said GOP party chief Michael Steele.
Unemployment has now topped 9.5 percent for 14 months in a row, the longest stretch since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Congress, meanwhile, has left town until after the midterms, failing to decide what to do about wide-ranging Bush-era tax cuts that are due to expire on Jan. 1. Uncertainty over those tax cuts itself is contributing to the lack of hiring as businesses, especially small ones, attempt to figure out what their tax burdens will be next year.
Obama and Democratic leaders want to let the tax cuts expire for wealthier Americans but extend them for the middle class. Republicans and some Democrats want to extend them for everybody, arguing that this is no time for any tax hikes.
The jobless level remains high even though Washington has hurled trillions of dollars at the problem. The efforts include an $814 billion stimulus package and the $700 billion financial institution bailout. Also, the Fed has held the short-term interest rates it controls near zero for months and has flooded the nation's financial system with hundreds of billions of dollars in newly created money.
Polls show little appetite for additional spending on stimulus, and a darkening view of Obama's ability to deal with the economy. An AP-GfK poll last month showed people disapprove of his handling of the economy by a 58 percent to 42 percent margin. A new CBS poll shows approval at just 38 percent.
"Both parties are culpable" for the policies that helped lead to the worst recession since the Great Depression and for continued high levels of unemployment, said Ross Baker, a congressional scholar at Rutgers University.
"But Democrats are more vulnerable. After all, they control all the political branches of government. Inevitably, it will greatly hurt the Democrats considerably more than it will hurt the Republicans."
GOP leaders have been taunting Democrats with "where are the jobs?" after each month's disappointing jobs report.
But that refrain was first sounded by Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., before she became House speaker. As the economy was slowly coming out of the 2001 recession, she asked in an October 2003 television appearance: "Mr. President, where are the jobs?"
But that month saw 203,000 new jobs and 6 percent unemployment, notes former Bush strategist Karl Rove. "Her party would kill for such a rate today," he wrote earlier this week. "Instead, they will be killed at the polls," he added.
Private businesses did add 64,000 jobs in September, but that was the weakest showing since June. And the gain was outpaced by a wave of government layoffs, including census jobs and the largest cuts by local governments in nearly three decades.
Economists say that at least 100,000 new jobs must be created each month just to keep pace with growth in the labor market.
___
EDITOR'S NOTE—Tom Raum covers economics and politics for The Associated Press.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
And, related from The American Spectator:
The Job Numbers
By Joseph Lawler on 10.8.10 @ 11:43AM
This morning the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the monthly jobs numbers. The news is all bad.
Payroll employment decreased by 95,000, leaving the unemployment rate unchanged at 9.6 percent. The private sector's gain of 64,000 was wiped out by the loss of 159,000 government jobs, 77,000 of which were temporary Census jobs.
Make no mistake, those are terrible numbers.
In general, bad news on employment hurts the administration and the Democrats politically. But today's numbers won't shape the political landscape one way or another, as close as it is to the election. There was almost no jobs report imaginable that could have made people think better of the incumbents' economic stewardship.
The administration's spin is that this is the ninth month in a row that the private sector has added jobs. True, that is an indication that the economy is improving. But when 15 million workers are out of a job, the underemployment rate increases (to 17.1 percent from 16.7), and the unemployment rate has been above 9.5 percent for the longest period since the Great Depression, it's futile to argue that the private sector is growing robustly.
Similarly, the liberal, pro-government spending interpretation of the report is that the problem is Republican opposition to fiscal aid to the states, which are shedding government jobs. There's truth to this, but remember that states could simply cut employees' wages instead of firing them. Also, the state employee job losses are insignificant relative to the private sector job growth that would represent real recovery, that is, hundreds of thousands of jobs per month. But at least we no longer have to suffer claims that fiscal stimulus will "prime the pump" or "kick-start the economy."
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