ADP doesn’t produce the most reliable jobs numbers — but then neither does the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So let’s go ahead and look at ADP’s April numbers:
The gloomy news continued for jobs as ADP reported Wednesday that private companies created just 119,000 new positions in April.
That was well below expectations and confirmation that the labor market is slowing heading into late spring and early summer.
Economists surveyed by Reuters expected the ADP report to show the private sector created 150,000 jobs in April, down from 158,000 in March.
Those private sector numbers aren’t entirely awful, provided you’ve enjoyed a few years of robust GDP and jobs growth, which are trailing off. But of course that never happened, this being the weakest “recovery” since the Great Depression. And it’s safe to put “recovery” in scare quotes, because what little growth we’ve had has been purchased by eating our seed corn, with Ben Bernanke gleefully strapping on the trillion-dollar feed bag.
And it’s a good thing government at various levels is shedding jobs, because we’ve seen up close and first hand that this whole “more locusts/smaller crops” economic theory (more government/smaller private sector) doesn’t exactly get the economy roaring. So we absolutely need to cut down, way down, on the locusts.
But the real problem is the crops aren’t growing. And for that you can thank ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, the debt overhang both public and private, the re-inflated housing bubble, and Americans’ increasing and unceasing dependence on the dole.
All of that is bad policy coming from Washington, and it won’t end any time before January 20, 2017.
If then.
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