The BLS reports 243,000 jobs added, unemployment at 8.3%.
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You are here: Home / Economics / Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You / Better Than Expected Jobs Report
rikryah
1. the GOP has a collective sad.
2. imagine what the Unemployment rate would be if they hadn’t gotten rid of all those public sector jobs at the state level
marcopolo
Wow! Great news. Where did that come from? If I remember, it is almost what we need to see on a monthly basis for the next 4-6 years to get back to where we want to be.
That aside, let’s hope it continues. Another half year of job reports like this and Obama should have the election locked up.
Cat Lady
Another good week for Obama. It’s almost like he knows what he’s doing.
Schlemizel
@rikryah:
Imagine what the numbers would be if the stimulus job had not been hijacked by the GOP &been larded with useless tax cuts!
Its against my nature but I am starting to actually be optimistic about November. If we can just keep this growth up it would be so good for the country in so many way beyond finally getting people back to work.
Off to surgery now – update you tonight if I can
SiubhanDuinne
Sorry for O/T, but wow, if the ads on this page are anything to go by, Google thinks I’m totally unlike who I am.
Dave
Ha ha ha!! So what is Mittens going to complain about now?
SiubhanDuinne
@Schlemizel: Thinking of you, hope all goes well.
Edited for spelling.
The Other Bob
At this rate it will get under 8% by election day, which I would think will make strong news. What was the unemployment rate in August 2008?
4tehlulz
@Schlemizel: Imagine what things would be like if the GOP hadn’t nearly blown up the world economy last summer.
WyldPirate
Much of the decrease in U-3 Is due to people that have given up. The labor force participation rate is still in the shitter.
participation rate
We have a long way to go…
SiubhanDuinne
@SiubhanDuinne:
Hahahahahahaha! As soon as I posted my O/T, up popped an Ancestry.com ad with the tagline “Who do you think you are?”
LOL, who says algorithms don’t have a sense of humor?!
scottinnj
Interestingly in the next few weeks we will have the debate (I use that term loosely) about whether to extend the payroll tax cut for the rest of 2012 (currently goes only to 2/29/12). Boehner/Cantor can either (a) say “we don’t need to extend this now that unemployment will come down or (b) allow the cut to be extended, which will probably be helpful in driving some addtional job growth between now and the November election. So do they vote for middle class tax hike or job growth? Couldn’t happen to nicer guys.
Cat Lady
@SiubhanDuinne:
Google thinks I want Ann Coulter for free, so yeah, no.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
Wait, Donald Trump said yesterday during his Romney endorsement that unemployment was increasing to 9.2%. Could it be that everyone associated with Romney is a liar?
Stevie314
This is EXCELLENT news for John McCain!
marcopolo
Speaking of ad targeting, I was looking at Neatdesk (if anyone here has experience with it and would like to comment please do) a few days ago, googling around and reading reviews. And voila, I now have an ad for the product up on the left hand side of the screen. Have to say in a weird way it reduces my interest in buying the product!
Ed in NJ
But, but , but …. my local Fox affiliate told me last night to expect 170K jobs, below expectations. You don’t think they were trying to game the news a bit, do you?
Chandler W.
This is really creepy. Last week my doctor sent me for blood tests for cholesterol levels.
Got the blood work done. Between the doctor’s appointment and the blood work, I never touched my laptop, desk top, iPhone or iPad to search anything pertaining to cholesterol.
Yet when I got home that afternoon and opened my iPad, there were the ads for cholesterol lowering foods, drugs, etc.
Can someone explain that?
Dan
@Ed in NJ: If that’s what they were doing, they’re pretty crappy at it. If people believed the Fox affiliate’s prediction, then they’d be even more surprised and pleased with today’s numbers.
Wee Bey
Where’s our resident Firebagger troll to tell me this isn’t good news?
Cacti
@WyldPirate:
WyldPirate swings by to piss on the picnic.
Quelle suprise.
General Stuck
Not a big surprise, as most indicators have been pointing to moderate but steady job growth now to at least the election. Still a lot of folks out of work, so it’s hard to get overly excited from this better than expected report. But we are all living in a high stakes political environment. And politically, it is good news for dems, bad news for republicans.
gene108
Big reason from the BLS report for the good employment numbers.
The public sector probably doesn’t have anyone left to lay-off, so you aren’t having public sector lay-offs dragging down private sector job growth.
Suffern ACE
@Dan: They won’t trust the numbers. In the past three years, they’ve been convinced that they are living in Weimar or Argentina. I wouldn’t completely underestimate the power of persuasion.
scottinnj
@Dan:
Not to defend Faux news, but the consensus expectations were +150k for jobs per Thomson/Reuters (a poll of various economic forecasters). Everyone really got it wrong, not just Fox.
Lawnguylander
WyldPirate’s emopunditry just doesn’t do it for me because he’s a nobody. I look forward to hearing Robert Reich on NPR telling me how this is actually bad news for Obama and if you compare today’s long term unemployment numbers to short term unemployment from 3 years ago things haven’t changed much at all. Or some similarly dishonest interpretation ofthe data.
RossInDetroit
I scan a few economics blogs regularly. Bonddad is a good one. They’re mostly cautiously optimistic. Nobody’s expecting a sudden rebound to prosperity but the outlook is generally much better than a year ago.
joes527
@Schlemizel:
How would not cutting taxes have added any jobs?
Don’t get me wrong. The Republican program to cut everything is evil and counterproductive. It harms the government’s ability to govern (by design) and it is keeping the deficit high. But it isn’t magic. Just because the tax cuts were the wrong way to go, that does not mean that they stained my carpet, made my teeth look yellow, or contributed significantly to the rate of recovery in employment.
The FIT they threw (offering to run the whole country off the cliff if they didn’t get their way) Yeah, that probably did contribute to uncertainty (oooh – not “uncertainty,” but that is the Republican argument about how the Dems are secretly to blame for everything. bwahahahahaha!)
Wee Bey
Fed Up in Brooklyn. That’s who it was.
redshirt
@Dave: Like any facts matter. He can stick to the same script regardless of so called “Real World” events. Obama’s failed us all! Rinse and repeat.
Danny
Imagine what this jobs report would have been if progressives had turned out in force in the 2010 midterms. We were at this pace one year ago, then Teaparty austerity hit the recovery square in the nuts. They – and the voters who voted them into office; and the voters who stayed home – put the recovery in limbo for a year.
Maude
@SiubhanDuinne:
#7 Thanks for saying that. I am too late to the thread to wish him well.
MikeJ
@Cacti: Not only that, he’s wrong. The U6 was 16 in October, it’s down to 15.1 now.
Our ratfucker can’t even get his lies right.
Michael
Nate Silver uses a model (that by his own admission only has moderate correlations with election outcomes) that, considering Obama’s approve/disapprove and unemployment numbers, we need to add ~$151K jobs/month for the rest of the way to make Obama a better-than-even shot at winning, not considering things other things that can effect the election (Mitt’s unfavorables, disparity in ground operations, etc).
Wee Bey
In all seriousness, this is across the board good news.
Everyone at the White House should get shitfaced tonight. And then get back to work in the morning.
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
Boehner/Cantor renege on the debt limit/defense cuts deal. As in ‘they’re going to act like no deal was struck, openly’. Also keep in mind that reducing the federal workforce is a nice way to up the unemployment rate by election day.
Not one drop of honor in the GOP these days. And the same goes for their voters.
mdblanche
@Dave: Another unforced error adding to the Thurston Howell narrative, a photo op featuring the most regrettable handshake by a Republican since Donald Rumsfeld, and now this. For a man who just won Florida, Willard is having a terrible week.
Stephen Sherman
What’s the over/under on when the Wingnuts will claim that the job numbers are being cooked by the administration?
I’ll go for 2PM ET.
OzoneR
@WyldPirate:
That isn’t true this month because the participation rate didn’t drop.
gene108
@OzoneR:
But it didn’t go up either, after several declines in the past year in the size of the labor force.
If I have time I’ll try to use my Google-fu to find out, but I think some of the drop maybe Baby Boomers deciding to retire, rather than try to keep looking for work in this labor market.
Some are probably long-term unemployed, who just gave up.
The recessions been brutal to the unemployed. Getting a job, once you’ve lost one has been very difficult and pretty much unprecedented in the duration people have been out of work.
I think the retirement issue will be important, because it’ll determine how many people will start looking for work again, as the labor market improves and that would drive up the U-3 rates, with a sudden surge of people entering the labor market.
OzoneR
@gene108:
no it didn’t, but that’s not the point. The unemployment rate dropped, which means either people participating in the labor force went back to work, or people left the force, or a combination of the two.
Nobody left the force, which means the fall is from the latter.
Does the mean it won’t go up? No, of course it will. If half of those who dropped out of the labor force go back to work, unemployment will rise by about 1%. The report says there are 1.1 million “discouraged” workers. If they all go back into the work force, unemployment will be above 9%, which is still substantially lower than it was two years ago.
staci
@Schlemizel: Imagine what it would be like if we hadn’t lost so many state, local and federal government jobs, so many teaching positions, firemen and policemen.
General Stuck
The best part of the report was an increase of 50,000 jobs in manufacturing, portending future hiring increases. Plus, the previous two monthly reports were amended upward for jobs created.
Martin
@The Other Bob: Actually, we’re trimming .2% per month right now. At this rate, we’ll be at 6.5% by election day.
Not only are jobs being added, but baby boomers are retiring faster than we’re adding workers – those programs to help students go to college help temporarily lower the unemployment rate, so students that go to college don’t count toward the labor force, and holy fuck are there a lot of students trying to go to college.
August 2008 unemployment rate was 6.1%. It’ll need to pick up a fair bit to hit that level, but it could fall under the rate it was in November 2008 – 6.8%, if everything keeps going as it is.
The problem with the long-term unemployment doesn’t play out in these reports because that problem is structural and impacts certain sectors. Manufacturing is our most notorious sector, but they’re recovering and it’s construction that’s completely screwed. Unlike manufacturing, where government generally can only stimulate jobs indirectly (except for DOD), construction can be easily stimulated directly. So it should be pissing people off that the sector most in need of help is the one the government can most easily help, and can most directly benefit.
But those Defense cuts that are coming are going to immediately cause at least some manufacturing hiring to stop. Hopefully it won’t be too much.
magurakurin
@WyldPirate: better stock up on Sad Pills buddy. It looks like the sun might be coming out.
Martin
Wow, Ohio and Michigan unemployment rates are dropping MUCH faster than the national average. Florida’s too. These swing states are really starting to turn around in a big way. Michigan could drop below the national average by summer at this rate, after they peaked at 14% in 2009.
Gust Avrakotos
Which means we are due for another paranoid “drones are commin to git us” post from Cup Half Empty Cole.
PeakVT
@joes527: I think Schlemizel’s point was that the composition of the stimulus bill wasn’t so hot. The tax cuts added jobs, but the multiplier for tax cuts is low. The bill would have done more if it was all straight-up new spending.
Martin
Interesting. I just looked at all of the state level data, and this is MUCH better news for Obama than would appear. Every state except for 5 are seeing unemployment rates drop as fast as the national average, or in most cases, much faster than the national average or are already at or below 5%. (State data lags, so things may have changed in the last month) The 5 exceptions:
Mississippi is stuck at 8.5% and has been for a year and a half.
Illinois, who has increased from 8.7% in April 2011 to 10.1% in October and is just barely starting to go back down (no idea why)
Indiana has gone up from 8.2% to 9% and is showing no signs of going down. So much for employers being excited about right to work prospects.
New York which is stubbornly holding at 8% and trending upward.
Kansas which is stuck at about 6.5% and not going anywhere.
Basically, Illinois is holding back a somewhat stronger recovery by continuing to shed jobs, and New York isn’t helping by not adding any – and both are large states so they overwhelm the gains being made in smaller states. But politically, only Indiana is in play. Illinois and NY will go for Obama even with the not improving economy. The swing states where jobs could be a pivotal factor are improving much faster than the national rate would suggest. Many may still be above the national average, but they won’t be for long.
feebog
Martin @ 44:
While I admire your enthusiasm, unemployment will not even be close to this number come November. At some point, most likely the next few months, some of those “discouraged workers” are going to come back into the labor workforce, which is going to slow the drop in unemployment considerably. That is not to say unemployment won’t continue to drop, it will, but more slowly than .2% a month. I think it is realistic to expect something south of 7.5, but not anywhere near 6.5%.
Martin
@feebog:
True, but at the same time, we’re not adding jobs at a level rate, the rate is increasing. So if the discouraged workers merely offset that growth, we’ll still come in. We added 243K jobs in Jan. and we’re climbing at about 40K per month. If we add a flat 200K per month level from now to November, that’s 1.8 million jobs which would put the rate at 7%, and even if we improve at half the rate we’ve seen over the last 4 months that allows 700K discouraged workers to return for free. So there’s at least some room for discouraged workers to return without notably slowing the improvement to the unemployment rate.
And because 600,000 of the lost jobs are public sector, as the overall unemployment rate improves, at least some states will see tax base gains and hopefully we’ll see some of those public sector jobs return as well.
WyldPirate
@Cacti:
Evidently, you’re too fucking stupid to understand that I didn’t say that the decreased unemployment rate wasn’t good news. It most assuredly is good news.
The reason I pointed out the statistic was to illustrate that the 8.3% number wasn’t an indicator that everything wasn’t rosy WRT to the economy by a long shot. The 16-24 unemployment rate is huge. A lot of jobs that were once held by those folks are being held by people that are overqualified for what they are doing. A bigger available labor pool also exerts downward pressure on wages in many sectors as well. Many people are going backwards economically from where they were a mere ten years ago.
I said nothing critical of Obama at all. Many of these trends are caused by things ae far beyond Obama’s or any other person or institution’s control. Simply pointing them out is not criticism of Obama.
But if you want a constant ray of Obama sunshine shining up your anal sphincter, continue on with your self-delusions by all means.
Bill H.
@OzoneR:
The number “not in the labor force” increased by 1,252,000 and the participation rate dropped by .3% in January. See Table C on the government publication at today’s News Release.
Bill H.
Correction. Those were the adjustments, but there was a reduction in the work force. Check the table.
WyldPirate
@OzoneR:
I agree. I was looking at the trend over a longer period and the fact that the number is still pretty flat over the past several months.
We had our biggest job losses over the last couple of months of Dubya’s term and the first 2-3 of Obama’s. Some of those folks found jobs and some have yet to find jobs and gave up. I certainly make no claims to being a whiz at the numbers and demographics behind the derivation of these data, but it makes sense to me that if the economy was truly in recovery from a labor standpoint, one would begin to see the participation rate start to nudge up a bit instead of being where it was 30 years ago in Reagan’s first term.
OzoneR
@WyldPirate:
as unemployment is dropping, which means the drop is entirely from being getting jobs.
WyldPirate
@Bill H.:
thanks for catching that, Bill H.
Unfortunately, I would imagine that you’re wasting you’re breath. Some of our BJ crew are no better than the numb nuts on the right wing they love to mock. They’re not above lying to themselves if facts and reality don’t fit conveniently into their view of the world.
WyldPirate
@OzoneR:
You should look at the link to the table a couple of posts up that Bill H. posted. the participation rate is the same as it was a year ago even given the fact that we have had 20+ months of postive employment growth.
Again, I’m not saying that the drop in U-3 isn’t good news. It is no matter where the drop came from. Things are looking up, but it isn’t all sunshine and roses yet was my point. Over the past 15 months, we’ve only had 7 months that exceed the 140-150K/month we need to just stay even with new people entering the labor force.
ruemara
@Schlemizel: Get better quickly, man. Safe surgery.
Danny
The FDL community deals with the happy news:
(They’re angry as hell. They’re even angry at the usually reliably anti-Obama blogger for calling this a solid jobs report, and demanding he “correct” his post.)
OzoneR
@WyldPirate:
Well it didn’t come from people leaving the job market since NOBODY FUCKING LEFT THE JOB MARKET IN A YEAR.
OzoneR
@Bill H.:
When adding “population control” which means its an estimate based on the estimated growth in population. Take that out and there was no change at all.
Cacti
@WyldPirate:
Charming as always WyldCracker.