After dipping to a five-year low last month, unemployment ticked back up a notch to 6.7% in February. The New York Times puts the best spin possible on the poor numbers.
The American economy added 175,000 jobs last month, a pace that was better than economists had expected and well above the anemic job gains recorded in December and January.
Still, the latest figures for hiring were down from last year’s average of roughly 190,000 and fell a bit short of what policy makers had been hoping to see at this stage of the recovery. The unemployment rate rose 0.1 percentage point to 6.7 percent.
The February report by the Labor Department had been eagerly awaited and was viewed as a wild card, with economists struggling to estimate the impact of wintry weather in many parts of the country as well as seasonal adjustments by government statisticians.
Before Friday’s report, the consensus among economists on Wall Street called for employers to have added 149,000 positions in February, with the jobless rate remaining flat at 6.6 percent.
The best thing we could do to foster job growth nationally is repeal Obamacare.
By the way, not all states are suffering equally in the Obama economy. And one state is not only creating jobs, it is creating them more equitably, according to that right-wing rag, the Washington Post.
Texas experienced stronger job growth than the rest of the nation from 2000 to 2013, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Not only that, a pair of researchersnote in a Thursday research publication, but Texas leads the nation in creation of jobs at all pay levels, too.
“Texas has also created more ‘good’ than ‘bad’ jobs,” they write. “Jobs in the top half of the wage distribution experienced disproportionate growth. The two upper wage quartiles were responsible for 55 percent of net new jobs. A similar pie chart cannot be made for the rest of the U.S., which lost jobs in the lower-middle quartile over the period.”
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