…again shows the failure of President Barack Obama’s economic ideology. And it comes in conjunction with the CBO’s report that Obama’s Obamacare is destructive of American employment.
The jobs report showed that we added all of 113,000 jobs in January. Oh, and the headline unemployment rate fell to 6.6%. That drop in unemployment is a thing about which to brag? Not so much.
In 2013, we added (an inadequate) 194,000 jobs per month. Adding December’s numbers, the two months of December and January contained a total of 188,000 jobs. We really need to be adding in the range of 330,000-350,000 per month in order to have a decent recovery from any recession, much less the Panic of 2008 (which ordinary Americans think still is in progress, albeit at the level of recession rather than panic).
Also buried in the numbers is a broader measure of unemployment: a statistic that also includes part-time workers who’d rather work full-time and folks that are marginally attached to the labor force (those unemployed who are on the verge of giving up but haven’t yet). This broader measure of unemployment was 12.7% for January. That’s a drop from December’s broader unemployment rate (of 13.1%), but it’s still abysmally high.
This is, for all that, improvement–how is that a failure? We’re where we should have been four years ago, even according to President Barack Obama’s own predictions back then.
Or, as
Before the Great Recession, there were 122 million full-time jobs in America. Now 4 1/2 years after its end, there are still just 118 million full-time jobs in America despite a labor force that is 1.6 million larger and a nonjailed, nonmilitary adult working-age population that is 14 million larger.
This graph which Pethokoukis reprinted from the Federal Reserve Economic Database paints the picture: 