A Solid Jobs Report? No, This Is a Crisis

A Solid Jobs Report? No, This Is a Crisis
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Employment: From the media to Wall Street, June's jobs report is being spun as a major positive, a sign the economy is getting back on track. Maybe the pundits should look at the actual numbers, which are abysmal.

To hear some of them, the 195,000 payroll jobs added for the month while the unemployment rate stayed at 7.6% were a big deal. One investment house called it a "very good report." Another termed it "solid."

Really? Let's take a little closer look at the numbers.

The total number of payroll jobs in the economy, at 135.9 million, is still 1.6% below 5-1/2 years ago, when the recession began. We're not even back at scratch.

At June's pace of 195,000 new jobs a month, it will take 11 months to get back to where we were in 2007. If you factor in monthly growth of 120,000 in the labor force, that will barely make a dent in unemployment.

In short, this jobs recovery isn't solid. It's pathetic.

It's even worse when you consider all of the net addition to June jobs - repeat, all - were part time. Compared with the 360,000 part-time positions created, full-time employment shrank by 240,000.

Year to date, only 130,000 full-time jobs have been added to our economy. The rest of the jobs - 557,000 - have been part time.

And tucked deep into the jobs report was this little tidbit: The underemployment rate, which measures those working in a job for which they're overqualified, or working part-time when they really want full-time work, shot up from 13.8% to 14.3%.

This isn't a solid jobs report. It's a crisis.

A new report from McKinsey & Co. says 45% of college graduates today have jobs that don't require college degrees. A generation of young, educated workers - our future human capital - is being wasted on waiting tables and selling shoes.

And those are the young people who can get jobs. The unemployment rate for 18- to 29-year-olds stands at 16.1%, with 1.7 million having dropped out of the labor force entirely.

Why is this happening?

Certainly five years of "stimulus" by President Obama and quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve haven't helped. And thousands of pages of new regulations, higher taxes on entrepreneurs and a deep philosophical antipathy toward healthy free markets by this administration have made businesses wary of hiring.

The No. 1 culprit, though, is ObamaCare. The added costs this monstrous piece of legislation has imposed on employers of full-time workers encourages them to hire only part-timers, who get few benefits and no health care.

So don't count us among those singing the praises of the latest employment numbers. From this vantage point, they look like more of the same: mediocrity.

 

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