Today, the Labor Department reported that 190,000 jobs were lost in October, worse than the 150,000 consensus in a Market Watch survey of economists. The Unemployment rate hit 10.2%, up from 9.8% a month ago, and much worse than what was expected.
Politically speaking, those on the Left will say that the current jobs report is better than in January when “we lost 700,000 a month.” I wrote already once that this excuse is lame, and the claim is false altogether. Besides, rest assure that those who lost their jobs this month don’t care for a dime how many more or less people lost jobs in this same month.
Those on the Right knew all along that the disasters job market is here to stay, and to get worse than what it was a while ago. On May 15, three months after the signing of the stimulus; a time when people were seeing “green shoots” and expecting wonders from Obama’s Stimulus; a time when the unemployment rate was at 8.9%; a time when Fed Chief Bernanke said that the unemployment rate won’t hit the 10% mark, and two months before Buffet warned of an 11% Unemployment Rate, I wrote the following on lohud.com (the article has been pulled since then):
“Sure, these and other statistics are “better” than November’s numbers, yet November and the immediate months after it were “depression era,” hardly an index against which to one would want to measure “better” times. Add to that the disastrous lagging indicator (jobs) that can itself destroy the economy. This leads me to conclude that for regular people on the street, though economic times have yet to reach full scale, and an unemployment rate of more than 11 percent might be here before we get to count the next twelve months.”
I know we are not close to 11 percent; however we are not yet at May ’10 either. Frankly, I was surprised that the Unemployment Rate didn’t crack the 10% figure two-three months ago, considering that so many things in the economy are still very bad. Yes, they are portrayed as “good” just on the basis that it’s not as bad as a year ago. But as I wrote in May, November of 2009 is hardly an era that you want to measure success against it.
As long Obama’s economy does not show a net gain on a monthly basis, and as long the unemployment rate doesn’t cool off, a spin of “saving or creating” jobs will, politically fall on death ears, and will economically keep the recovery down.
