Today's Jobs Report

New unemployment numbers are out, and it's actually a little bit of good news for a change:

The unemployment rate edged down to 10.0 percent in November, and nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged (-11,000), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. In the prior 3 months, payroll job losses had averaged 135,000 a month. In November, employment fell in construction, manufacturing, and information, while temporary help services and health care added jobs.

In November, both the number of unemployed persons, at 15.4 million, and the unemployment rate, at 10.0 percent, edged down. At the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of unemployed persons was 7.5 million, and the jobless rate was 4.9 percent.

Since jobs are the key to real economic recovery in this country, any good job news is good economic news.  But this is simply saying that there is a slowdown in the number of jobs being lost...it's not like there is a net gain in overall jobs.  It's good that the losses are slowing, but it's not exactly a smashing recovery, which is what the White House and the legacy media are certain to be peddling.  And, it is also false that this slowdown of losses is the result of Obama's stimulus and economic policies, for any number of reasons.  For example:

...if you hear any fool on the left contending that the Obama administration can be credited with turning the economy around, the BLS release gives us a lot of reasons to point out our economy has steadily deteriorated during this year: "Last month, the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) rose by 293,000 to 5.9 million. The percentage of unemployed persons jobless for 27 weeks or more increased by 2.7 percentage points to 38.3 percent."

Also note "construction employment declined by 27,000 over the month." Every month since the stimulus passed, employment in the construction field has dropped, confirming the president's admission that the "shovel ready" slogan of the stimulus package was bunk.

And:

Most attention will be focused on the fact that the unemployment rate fell from 10.2 percent to 10 percent.  However, the unemployment rate fell because many people dropped out of the labor force entirely. Teenagers, who have the highest unemployment rate, were the most likely to leave the labor force. High-school dropouts and high-school graduates also left the labor force, and these groups also have high unemployment rates. The drop in the unemployment rate is due to these groups leaving the workforce. The unemployment rate will climb once more workers return to the labor force, so it is very likely that the unemployment rate will continue to climb well into 2010.

And:

The jobs report might, to borrow a phrase, "hide the decline" in employment. Two economists who predicted that the November numbers would be better than expected say the improvement may be attributable to quirks in the Labor Department's statistical models.

The models adjust for regular seasonal fluctuations in employment, but give added weight to fluctuations in recent years. So the 610,000 jobs that were lost last November in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse—the first decline in that month since 2001 and the largest ever recorded—figured heavily into the Department's estimate of new jobless claims, and could have given "the impression the labor market is improving faster than it actually is."

Said one of the economists: "[I]t may not be a sign that we have gotten to the point where we are going to see sustainable gains in employment."

Thus:

Porkulus has done nothing for those fields that Obama claimed to be stimulating: long-term jobs, construction, and manufacturing.  The only jobs increasing this year are temp jobs, health care, and government sector jobs, the latter only occasionally.

And here's some great perspective on government jobs:

There is a real difference between a government job and a job in the private sector. Private sector jobs contribute to the growth of the economy because the private sector employee produces a product or provides a service that the consumer wants to buy, thus generating income, producing wealth, expanding economic activity and thereby providing the basis for increasing employment.

 

No government employee produces any product or service that the consumer purchases. Hence government jobs produce no income, create no wealth, generate no economic expansion, and provide no economic incentive for job creation. What's more, all government jobs are paid for with revenues taken from the private sector in the form of taxes on individuals and businesses, thus siphoning economic resources out of the productive private economy and dumping them into the non-productive government economy.

So, the bottom line is that yes, a few less layoffs are happening right now than last month, and that's great.  Like I said, I think we'd all take any good jobs news we can get.  But, we need to keep our heads and understand what really creates jobs.  There is no stretch of the imagination that can explain Obama's policies driving a long-term economic recovery.  They might appear to help temporarily (as we've discussed before), but they aren't a real method of stimulating the economy for long-term growth and real recovery.

History and basic economics show us the correct way to recover an economy, and it ain't Obamanomics.

There's my two cents.


PS - on a related note, Canada has great job growth last month, in part due to a major GM SUV factory opening up there.  Good thing the ***ahem*** ownership of GM is all about creating American jobs, huh?