This Jobs Disaster Could Have Been Avoided

This morningâ??s Employment Situation Report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was bad news masking even worse news. The economy added 69,000 jobs in May, far below the consensus expectation of economic forecasters. And the consensus expectation wasnâ??t even particularly optimistic. Few thought we could repeat the 200,000-plus jobs per month that we were adding in the winter, and absolutely nobody dared hope for the kind of 300,000-400,000 monthly job increases that would be associated with a traditional bounce-back economic recovery. But 140,000 or 150,000 new jobs would at least have continued to take a bite out of unemployment. Instead we got 69,000â??basically flat with population growth.