The U.S. economy created more jobs than expected in July, but lowered expectations have contributed to an optimistic market reaction even as unemployment rose to 8.3%. The unemployment rate has now remained stuck above 8% for 41 consecutive months. No incumbent president since the Second World War has ever been re-elected with unemployment above 8%.
Meanwhile, June’s jobs numbers, which were an anemic 80,000, were revised down by the Department of Labor to just 64,000. Today’s July numbers of 164,000 will probably meet a similar revision next month.
Real unemployment in the U.S., which takes into account people who have given up and stopped looking for work, remains around 15%.
Update: Mitt Romney responds:
Today’s increase in the unemployment rate is a hammer blow to struggling middle-class families. Yesterday I launched my Plan for a Stronger Middle Class that will bring more jobs and more take home pay. My plan will turn things around and bring the economy roaring back, with twelve million new jobs created by the end of my first term. President Obama doesn’t have a plan and believes that the private sector is “doing fine.” Obviously, that is not the case. We’ve now gone 42 consecutive months with the unemployment rate above eight percent. Middle class Americans deserve better, and I believe America can do better.
Via @jimpethokoukis on Twitter: In 2009, Team Obama predicted 5.6% unemployment rate in July 2012 w/ stimlus, 6% w/o stimulus.
Here’s the original chart that Joe Biden and Christina Romer had prepared back in 2009, with data in red added to show what actually happened since then:
http://i49.tinypic.com/67rupe.jpg
(this is as of June 2012)
Since Obama entered office: (1) the Dow has rebounded and is up more than 5,400 points to a high of 13,367 (in the aftermath of Bush 43, the Dow loss 6,786 points and was continuing to nosedive); (2) unemployment is slowing and 4.3 million jobs have been created (when Bush 43 left office, unemployment was 8.4%, 14 million Americans were out of work, and the economy was hemorrhaging 764,000 jobs per month); (3) the GDP is showing consistent monthly growth, (5) middleclass payroll and income taxes have been reduced to and all-time low, generating an additional $3600 in disposable income for the average middleclass family; (6) 43 million more Americans have health insurance; (7) government spending is down 7.2 percent, compared to the Clinton surplus Bush 43 quickly turned into a deficit topping $11.4 trillion; (8) Wall Street and banks are again solvent and sitting on more than $4 trillion in disposable revenue; (9) number of border guards doubled to 22,342; (10) small business have received 17 tax cuts, totaling $671 billion; (11) the unfairly maligned bailout that Romney has denigrated helped Detroit avoid bankruptcy, and GM is once again the worldwide leader in auto sales; and (12) Osama swims with the fishes. No bad for a president who has received not one iota of help from a do nothing Congress guided by the failed leadership of John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and Paul Ryan.
Get ready for another four years of mature and principled leadership with President Obama.
A do nothing Congress is much to be preferred to a lawless Congress, which is what we have had when Democrats are in charge.
Speaking of “do nothing”, how’s the Senate doing with that budget thing?
There were more people employed when Bush left office than at any time since. The deepest recessions have historically been followed by the most vigorous growth — unless the government strangles the economy, which is what Obama & Co. have done, giving us (so far) 3.5 years of the most sluggish economy since the Great Depression.
Recessions are normal; recovery is normal. This is abnormal, because there has been no recovery.
A debt that exceeds GDP is what Obama & Co. gave us. A credit downgrade is what Obama & Co. gave us. Inflation is what Obama & Co. gave us.
Taxpayer money is funneled to “green” companies that are going bankrupt, run by Obama donors.
Profitable auto dealerships, mostly run by Republicans, were shut down by Obama — often to benefit Democrat donors.
GM could have recovered through normal bankruptcy procedures. Obama imposed an illegal process that gave priority to Obama-donating unions.
Obama’s budgets have been so reckless that they’re unanimously voted down in both the House and the Senate.
The Senate Democrats won’t even produce a budget, though they are constitutionally required to pass one every year. The pathetic Harry Reid consistently blocks the serious budgets etc. that come from the House.
Yeah, tell us about “mature and responsible” leadership.
Obama was one of the Democrat senators who blocked the efforts by Bush & other Republicans to clean up the big mess brewing in the Dem-controlled Fannie & Freddie. Democrats are primarily responsible for pushing banks into perilous lending practices.
Obama & Co. provoked the economic crisis, which they then exploited –with help from their lapdog media — as their opportunity to bring it all down man and seize unprecedented power.
Then why doesn’t Obama run on this “record of achievement” instead of running a 10,000% negative campaign against Romney? Surely the American public would love to hear about all those accomplishments you listed.
That do-nothing congress was totally Democrat controlled for two years after The One’s election. The Senate still is. Any sign of a budget yet?
You own this economy, Obama.
C.W.;
You are such a proud idiot; Who does your transcribing for you?
Who is the official authority that calculates the unemployment rate? Did we always not include the people who gave up looking? Is the same calculation used now that was used 5, 10 years ago? Why do we present 8.3% when a “real” number is 15%. I like to see what is real presented, did we always have a “modified” version presented…I don’t get it?
The unemployment rate is calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is part of the Department of Labor. There are actually two reports that are reported–one is done by surveying a sample of household and the other is from a survey of a sample of businesses. The unemployment rate comes from the first survey; the numbers of jobs comes from the second. To compute the unemployment rate, people are put into four categories–cannot choose because they are under 16 or institutionalized, choose not to work, choose to work and are working, and choose to work but do not have a job. However, some people do not fit clearly in a category, such as the people who would like to work but are not looking for work, or those who are working part-time but who would like to work full time. To deal with these ambiguities, the BLS now publishes six different measures of unemployment–see http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm. The official number (currently 8.3%) is the one that has been calculated over the longest period of time.
In my opinion, there’s only one honest unemployment (or rather, employment) statistic: civilian labor force participation rate. The Bureau of Labor Statistics simply estimates from the census how many American residents are of working age (18-64, I believe) and simply divides that into how many it estimates are working. According to them (http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000/) this number has gone steadily down since Obama took office, has dropped about 2% since then, and is the lowest in about 30 years.
There’s also the issue of *underemployment*.
Breaking down the total jobs number:
A quarter of the jobs that were created were part-time jobs.
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2012/07-2/Part%20vs%20Full%20Time%20July.jpg
And the sectors that had the most job growth were: business and professional services, food service, and “drinking establishments.” I kid you not.
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2012/08/july-employment-report-163000-jobs-83.html
So we’re getting jobs all right: Low-wage jobs as burger-flippers, coffee baristas and bartenders.
Throughout the so-called recovery, the temporary services category has consistently been one of the fastest growing sectors.
This is a very bad sign. It means businesses are not hiring full-time, permanent workers. They’re temporarily expanding capacity with non-permanent contract employees – whose services they can quickly terminate when the work is complete or the economy contracts again.
This is Obama’s idea of Obama’s America,
the negro hates America
IMPEACH OBAMA, IMPRISON OBAMA,
You should send that one to the RNC. It’s a winner, fer sure …
The not in labor force category grew by 348,000 in June.
http://bls.gov/news.release/empsit.a.htm
YoY it has grown by 2million people.
No mention in the media about this trend at all.
Everybody has seen Obama in his bigot mode many times.
He’s racially profiling his enemies, and committing hate crimes against Conservatives.
So; What’s different from any ghetto boy and him?
Obama did promise “fundamental transformation” of the United States and he is delivering…
4 more years, No hope for America…
obozo, our clown in chief and economic dunce has told us his plan is working. The plan, his budget, which gets zero votes, not even harry reid votes for obozo’s budget.
So I was so glad to see the news that obozo’s plans are working; As reported by CNSNews
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/195000-fewer-americans-had-jobs-july-150000-dropped-out-labor-force
CNSNews.com) – There were 195,000 fewer people employed in the United States in July than in June, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as the national unemployment rate ticked up from 8.2 percent to 8.3 percent.
Meanwhile, 150,000 people simply dropped out of the labor force during the month and did not seek to find a job.
In June, according to BLS, there had been 142,415,000 people employed in the United States. In July, that dropped to 142,220,000–a decline of 195,000.