Quit trying to fool us with these job numbers.

Friday, President Obama commented on the most recently released job numbers. He said, “The economy added more than 100,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate fell sharply. Now we know these numbers can bounce around from month to month. But the trend is clear.”

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I hear how he tries to spin the dismal economic news of the day. But I think that I’m tending more to laugh lately, because I don’t think people are buying it. And this in spite of his cheerleaders in the establishment media.

Yes, Mr. President, the trend is clear. But it’s not what you say it is. The trend is that the economy is sick and flat. This isn’t a “fragile recovery” as you keep repeating, and polls show people aren’t believing it. This is no recovery, not really. The last poll I saw on the subject shows that most people believe we’re still in a recession.

Here are the numbers for the job growth in the economy in 2010. Now these are the initial numbers reported by the Labor Department. There have been times when these initial reports are later revised downward significantly. But those reports are buried in the news, so they’re difficult to find.

  • December: added 103,000 jobs
  • November: added 39,000 jobs
  • October: added 151,000 jobs
  • September: lost 95,000 jobs
  • August: lost 54,000 jobs
  • July: lost 131,000 jobs
  • June: lost 125,000 jobs
  • May: added 431,000 jobs
  • April: added 290,000 jobs
  • March: added 162,000 jobs
  • February: lost 36,000 jobs
  • January: lost 20,000 jobs

The net for the entire year comes to a little more than 700,000 added jobs. Sounds like a weak recovery, doesn’t it. But not so fast. There’s a little detail being omitted here.

The United States labor force grows by approximately 1% each year. With a total labor force of about 156 million, that means it takes 1.56 million jobs added per year, or 130,000 jobs added per month just to keep up with the growth in population.

The New York Times, in an apparent attempt to appear more credible, made some reference to this concept when it reported the November job numbers, but they distorted the facts. Here’s what they said:

“The jobless rate has not fallen substantially this year, largely because employers have barely added enough workers to absorb the people just entering the labor force.”

Nice try, New York Times, at manipulating how we are looking at this. The truth is that it’s not “barely enough to keep up.” It’s falling behind further and further. Yes, this is indeed the Great Recession.


About mesasmiles

By Dr. David Hall. Dr. Hall runs The Website Factory, a digital marketing agency. He has had a long-standing interest in politics. As a college student he was Utah State Chairman for both Young Americans for Freedom and Youth for Nixon, and toyed with the idea of a political career.
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