The George Bush Economy
From the Washington Post:
The nation's economy generated 75,000 new jobs last month, the Labor Department reported today, about half the growth anticipated by economists.How long can gay baiting and xenophobia stand up against an unpopular war, multiple and expanding scandals and a lousy economy?
Job creation was revised downward in the survey for the months of March and April as well. For March, there were 175,000 new jobs created versus a previous figure of 200,000. The April jobs increase of 138,000 was downgraded to 126,000.
Unemployment, measured by a different survey, remained essentially unchanged at 4.6 percent, compared with 5.1 percent a year earlier. Unemployment is at the lowest level in five years.
Today's job creation figures suggested slowing economic activity, which could ease pressure on the Federal Reserve to continue raising key interest rates, except that other indicators, such as rising payrolls and the prices of energy and raw materials point in the other direction.
Under-employed people, workers who have jobs but haven't had a raise in years, and people dealing with rising energy costs are going to start feeling the pinch. Here's hoping the Republicans will be feeling it soon too.
1 comment:
I don't trust any of these economic figures. When you look at the nuts and bolts of how they're devised, you see they're all based on projections, statistical models and other variables that can be tweaked to come up with whatever spin the politicos want. Just like the unemployment rate -- it doesn't measure the number of people who don't have jobs; it counts how many are getting dole payments. When you run through all your bennies, you're off the rolls and presto! the unemployment rate is lowered a tick. But you still don't have a job...
After getting hammered during the 2004 presidential campaign for failing to create a single new job, the Cheney administration decided it would be best to cook the books to make it seem as if there were more jobs out there. But this month, it suits them say there weren't TOO many created, because if there's big increase, the Fed will have more reason to raise interest rates. And that will put more pressure on people ready to crack it with their mortgage rates. Next month they might need to announce a huge increase in jobs to counter some bad news from the eternal war. They've infiltrated their stooges in the bean-counting departments so the stats can be massaged to say anything that suits them. After all, they create reality, and those of us in the "reality-based community" merely react to what they create.
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