From today's San Diego Tribune, "February hiring falls far short of predictions":
The nation's employers added only 21,000 new workers last month, fewer than the lowest economists' forecasts and far below the number of job seekers hitting the unemployment lines.In a further sign that the three-year "jobless recovery" is continuing, nearly all the new jobs came from government hiring, the Labor Department reported yesterday. Private-sector hiring was flat for the month, according to a survey of employers.
A separate survey of households found that 265,000 fewer people said they had jobs than the month before.
"This is a terrible number," said Sung Won Sohn, chief economist at Wells Fargo. "The economic recovery is almost three years old, and the economy should be producing 200,000 to 300,000 jobs per month. Obviously, the relationship between economic growth and employment has broken down."
Making matters worse, the Labor Department lowered its figure for new hires for the past two months. The count of job gains for January was revised to 97,000 from 112,000 and for December to just 8,000 from 16,000.
The sluggish hiring did not come close to matching the 150,000 or so workers that enter the work force each month. Nevertheless, the jobless rate held steady at 5.6 percent largely because unemployment benefits have expired for many Americans, who are no longer reflected on the unemployment rolls.
It is estimated that 392,000 Americans dropped off the jobless rolls in February, unable to find work within the six months that unemployment insurance covers.
If current trends continue, President Bush may be the first president since Herbert Hoover to suffer a net loss of jobs during a term. Currently, there are more than 2 million fewer payroll jobs in the United States than when Bush took office.
To stir job creation, Bush pushed a package of tax credits that he said would create 2.5 million jobs by February. About 294,000 jobs have been added since the tax cuts took effect last June just 12 percent of Bush's projected job gains and far less than the typical job growth after a recession.
Nearly every day some Republican somewhere uses the excuse of fighting terrorism and the Iraqi war in an attempt to shift responsibility away from themselves and their failures here at home with the economy, jobs, health care, and so on.
It almost seems to me like some Republicans prefer to take up the sword against other peoples. They take the sword to enrich themselves, and in the hopes we will get caught up in patriotic fervor and forget our problems here at home. If we question the Republicans we are accused of encouraging terrorism.
Republicans and their talk show hosts (O’Rielly, Hannity, Limbaugh, etc) take every opportunity to say that to question Bush or the party will most certainly invite another terrorist attack on our nation. Meanwhile, our nation is slowly falling apart from the inside because Bush can’t be bothered to do his Constitutional duty and take care of our country.
Jesus Christ once said, "What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?” (Matthew 16:26). He also said, "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:3). What good will it do to win the war on terrorism if our own nation falls apart from the inside out first? It is important to defend our nation, but to defend our nation cannot become an excuse to ignore our problems here at home.
Posted by: Jesse on September 24, 2004 09:40 AM
