The new jobs numbers (163,000 new jobs, unemployment at 8.3%) are slightly better than expected but still not good.
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by @heymistermix.com| 58 Comments
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Shawn in ShowMe
Considering the experts told us two years ago that we’d be at 10% unemployment or worse for the next two years, we’re actually ahead of schedule.
Until small business knows what the tax break situation is going to be, they won’t have the certainty they need to expand their businesses. Big business, on the other hand, has been gleefully reducing head count and “optimizing operating costs” for over a decade. They can no longer be counted on to be the job creators Mittbot claims they are.
brent
Well I think the expectation was 100,000, so that way exceeds those I think. Also, obviously we are pretty far in the hole but 160,000 is really not a bad number.
Walker
@Shawn in ShowMe:
That is complete nonsense. Uncertainty always exists in business. The only thing that expands a business is demand, which they do not have.
General Stuck
Not a strong jobs report, but manufacturing jobs continue to be created. That is likely cold comfort for the millions still out of work, for so long. Election Politics, and the intersection with human considerations, seems cruel, but so would a Romney presidency, times 11.
Dave
I wish that unemployment number would go down. But doesn’t 163K private sector jobs pretty much go against what Romney and the GOP have been arguing this whole time – that Obama doesn’t understand how the private sector works?
@VividBlueDotty
@Dave: It would if Romney had any kind of respect for the truth. But for him, “truth” is whatever just spewed out of his mouth just now.
Xboxershorts
It will never be good enough as long as our government ignores all those public sector non-jobs
RaflW
Just read the USA Today article online – it is the most read paper paper after all. They mention in the numbers part that 79,000 government jobs were lost, but then go on to all the blah blah of why private sector hiring remains slow and never again mention the ongoing, years-long decimation of government employment that once again continued in July.
arguingwithsignposts
@Xboxershorts:
FTFY
mk3872
The consensus guess was 100k new jobs.
The report showed 163k.
That means that the actual number came in @ nearly 50% better than expected.
How does that qualify as only “slightly better” ??
General Stuck
@Dave:
I think local conditions for voters regarding the job situation, trumps whatever national number the BLS comes up with month to month. Though there is likely a correlation between the two. Though not clear cut. So for political reasons, during an election campaign, it is the amount and taste of red meat for the media mill that has center stage. I think it is better for dems and Obama to point to the raw jobs numbers, as ‘improvement’ over last month, that to defend a number under 100 K, as a kind of psychological threshold. Same in reverse for the wingers trying to make pol hay out of a .1 increase in percent of unemployment. Or, shorter me, it’s all bullshit, but it is our bullshit.
Shawn in ShowMe
@Walker:
If it’s nonsense, it’s nonsense that at least two small business owners I know believe strongly. And I’ve heard similar noises on small business blogs across the intertoobs.
imonlylurking
The weird thing is, for all of the talk about the declining economy, all of my friends are fully employed for the first time since I’ve known them. (Except for the one doing a masters in history in London.)
Every. Single. One.
Quincy
163k is about as much as we can hope for given Republican obstructionism and state budget cuts. I wish the last 3 months had been that good and really hope the next 3 are.
jwb
Uptick in UE rate was actually under .1%: 8.217 to 8.254. Essentially noise, except it slipped above the rounding threshold.
Culture of Truth
Still better than losing 500,000
brent
@Shawn in ShowMe: I certainly cannot speak to what the business owners you have spoken to believe or don’t believe but the notion that businesses are leaving money on the table because they are concerned about whether a tax on their profits will shift 3-5% one way or the other is not particularly reasonable to me. If there are people out there willing to buy what they are selling, their paralysis from “uncertainty” resembles something more like stupidity. Their problem is that there are no buyers.
Davis X. Machina
@RaflW: That’s because there are 60-70 million voters in this country that believe ‘zero’ is the right number of public-sector jobs.
You could base a whole political party on that, and win elections.
Cold civil war….
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Shawn in ShowMe: I’ll bet you that if you actually ask them, they wouldn’t actually hire new people just because the “tax uncertainty” stabilized. It’s the business equivalent of “keep government out of my Medicare.”
jwb
@Shawn in ShowMe: That’s because those are the talking points being spread around. Small businesses will hire when there is increased demand for their products or work. I know few small business owners who have idle capital available to hire on speculation.
Culture of Truth
Since December of 2007 the U.S. lost 4,300,000 private sector jobs.
In 2012 the private sector has added 1.1 million.
RaflW
@arguingwithsignposts:
It really does seem like the patient has two forms of serious illness, and we’re not allowed to even mention one of them, the one that is actually the more critical one at the moment: 100s of thousands of public sector jobs being cut over the past several years.
Police, fire, teachers, parks, local and state clerical and supervisory. The GOP is getting the shrinking government they want, but in a very weirdly quiet way.
I guess Obama doesn’t want to acknowledge the job losses, otherwise he could do a classic Clinton triangulation to say “look, I’ve presided over a significant cut in government jobs. It’s what you GOPers said you’ve always wanted. I’ve done your job for you while you’ve all been WATBs.”
I know it won’t happen. I also think a chunk of those public sector jobs are important and should be brought back. Class sizes for students are becoming ridiculous in many school districts, just to name one glaring problem with GOP small-gov’t utopia.
Walker
@Shawn in ShowMe:
Given how small the tax breaks are that we are talking about, this just tells me that the business people you know are really, really bad at business.
Lawnguylander
@Shawn in ShowMe:
I know three business owners who believe the exact opposite of what your two business owning friends believe. That’s 50% more business owners and I’m in agreement with them so that makes 100% more. Seeing how you value anecdata, your mind is changed, right?
raven
Go over the fucking cliff.
RaflW
@Davis X. Machina:
Many of whom are on Medicare &/or use the VA, just for starters. But who the fuck cares about reality.
geg6
Completely OT, but the closing arguments on the PA voter id hearing happened yesterday. I am cautiously optimistic:
http://www.aclupa.blogspot.com/
Davis X. Machina
@RaflW:
Sixty-plus years ago, my dad used to sing a song that went “Better than his brother Joe / Dominic DiMaggio.”
He wasn’t.
If you’re going to be a fan of Team Red, you have to believe a lot of things that aren’t so.
Culture of Truth
@RaflW:
Obama: “Weâve created 4.3 million jobs over the past 27 months. The private sector is doing fine. Where weâre seeing problems is with state and local government, often with cuts initiated by governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help theyâre accustomed to from the federal government.”
Another Halocene Human
Even when public sector is hiring, they’re trying to pull two-tier wage structure and hire at much lower wages. What’s that going to do for demand?
ericblair
@RaflW:
I think it will, because it’s a rather easy thing to understand. Goopers rail against public sector jobs, ram through cuts in public sector jobs, then scream that we’re losing public sector jobs and it’s all Obummer’s fault. Then explain that a lot of these jobs are teachers, firefighters, and cops that people actually appreciate. I’d assume we’ll have some variant of this argument as we go; I don’t see any reason to avoid this discussion.
magurakurin
@Davis X. Machina: well, actually not zero…one is the right number.
That being their wife’s job at the County Office.
fuck em. They’re goin’ down in November. Rmoney is toast and they won’t take the Senate. Reid is going to change the filibuster rule and it’s going to be motherfuckin’ clobbering time.
It may be cold civil war, but these fucks are going to lose again.
Sherman should have hung all those rebel fucks.
dr. bloor
@Shawn in ShowMe: Ask your friends which of the following is more likely to have an impact on their hiring: a razor-thin reduction in their tax rates, or 10-20% more people walking through their doors to buy stuff.
Your friends are spouting nonsense. It’s all about the demand.
Shawn in ShowMe
@Lawnguylander:
Nah, it just means you know fewer wingnut business owners than I do;-) From the responses I received, I’ll willing to entertain the notion that the tax break excuse is just another talking point. This is Missouri after all. Obama Derangement Syndrome is pretty common around here.
NotMax
@Davis X. Machina
Florida now trying to make religions (well, we all know they mean just the ‘right’ religions) into government-paid employees, sans any benefits of course.
Undertaking the making of Florida into Theocristan.
EconWatcher
@geg6:
Do we know who the presiding judge is? Is he or she a wingnut?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Going the way our companies 401K manager predicted; everyone spazzed out about Greece and the Euro last April, stalled the world economy and now it’s dying down and the economy is picked back up. But stock brokers are O-bots so who cares.
jwb
@magurakurin: we still need a strategy for taking back the House. I think the Dems are going to try to nationalize the election starting with the convention. Historically that has been a dicey proposition and given unfavorable redistricting and the fact that several Dems have decided to stay away it’s hard to know if they can get it to work. I’m also not certain how well the Dems did in finding good candidates to run against incumbent GOP. But without the House it’s simply going to be more of the past two years.
jwb
@magurakurin: we still need a strategy for taking back the House. I think the Dems are going to try to nationalize the election starting with the convention. Historically that has been a dicey proposition and given unfavorable redistricting and the fact that several Dems have decided to stay away it’s hard to know if they can get it to work. I’m also not certain how well the Dems did in finding good candidates to run against incumbent GOP. But without the House it’s simply going to be more of the past two years.
General Stuck
OT
I know most of us have been reading the usual RW catterwalling about recent polls, especially the new PEW poll out yesterday, with the wingnuts fuming about oversampling dems, as some kind of plot to undermine Romney.
Here is an interview transcript with Peter Brown, HUGH HEWITT LINK head of Quinnipiac U polling, trying to explain to morons how they get to those numbers via the interview process, and response from likely voters on what party they most consider themselves to be. Not as a registered R or D or I, but concurrent with their mindset at the time of being polled.
It is ironic, and maybe telling that this poll giving Obama a ten point lead was done by Quinnipiac, that historically, is right there near Rassmussen for low numbers concerning democrats. It sounds like, a lot of people out there who may be registered republican, don’t want to admit that to pollsters. Just one poll, could be an outlier, but worth watching if it’s a trend developing. And if so a trend, not surprising, since Romney and the wingnuts have done their best to alienate whole blocks of voters, such as single women, and Hispanics.
Dennis SGMM
@dr. bloor:
Sadly, yes. Our small town is rapidly losing businesses that have been around for decades. Every owner with whom I’ve spoken said that lack of demand was what did them in.
Absent customers, no small business will expand.
NotMax
OT
Hey, isn’t today the kiss-in at those chicken joints?
Wonder how many news helicopters will be cluttering the skies as compared to Wednesday.
Davis X. Machina
@ericblair
Some people, some of the time.
I’m a public school teacher, and I lie about what I do for a living when I don’t have time for an argument, thanks in part to my governor. God knows what I’d be reduced to doing if I were a civil engineer for the Department of the Environment, say, never mind a clerk at the DMV.
I’m convinced that Chris Christie should have run for the White House this go-round, as ‘the can-do leader to run the war against America’s real enemies — public employees’.
By 2016, it’ll be too late — there’ll either be a GOP incumbent, or all the NJ chickens will have come home to roost. But it would have done the trick….
raven
@NotMax: The Athens paper has it on the front page, not the AJC.
General Stuck
@General Stuck:
Sorry, got my polls mixed. Brown is with Quinnipiac poll on swing states. Pew is another poll giving Obama a ten point lead nationally. The premise is the same however, for both getting more folks that say they ID with dem party, and why dems are oversampled.
Randy P
@geg6: I’ve been reading the daily updates there. The personal stories are pretty riveting stuff. Hard to see how a rational judge could uphold the law, but… I’m not sure how rational the judiciary is in my state (PA)
gene108
@jwb:
I think a realistic chance of flipping the House isn’t going to happen until 2014 or, in my opinion, 2016.
It really depends on how effectively Obamacare is implemented in red states. If the people, who are cynical of government are better off in any way because of the government, i.e. Obamacare, they may shake off their allegiance to the GOP and start voting for Democrats.
The New Deal put the stamp of government being a force for good writ large across the country and sustained Democratic majorities in the House for generations.
Obamacare is the most ambitious expansion of government to help people in generations and if it works, I really think you can see people start buying into government can be good again and vote against Republicans.
gene108
@Davis X. Machina:
I’ve been living in NJ for 15 years. From my experience in NJ Christie has this going for him:
NJ Governors, since I moved here:
1. Whitman
2. Interim Governor (Whitman to EPA)
3. McGreevey (resigned over cheating on wife with gay lover)
4. Interim Governor
5. Corzine (tried to get things working, is an arrogant dick and ran for reelection in a terrible recession)
6. Christie
The bar of Christie to clear to be all “gubenatorial” in the recent memory of NJ residents is pretty low, in my opinion.
For all his brashness, he’s no more arrogant than Corzine and he at least is pandering to a part of the state that is strongly Republican, so they love him and will have his back.
feebog
Two antecdotes; my son, who lives in NW Washington state finally got a job after being out of work for a year. Its not as good a job as the one he had, but he has room to grow and promote. I talked to him a couple days ago and said “thank God for unemployment insurance”. He agreed, he had to fight for it (with a little assist from me, all the way through the appeal level. My son is very conservative, but I am chipping away with remarks like this. Interestingly, his two oldest, 20 and 18 seem to be turning out to be quite liberal.
Also had a discussion with a fellow Director on my Neighborhood Council. This guy is a CPA and an attorney, super smart, with a beautiful young family. Conservative, but not rabid. We got into an interesting discussion about demand vs. supply economics. I pointed out to him that if we had passed another stimulus package a lot of the public employees who have lost their jobs would still be working and employment would be down another percentage point or so. He argued that there are still too many public employees. I sent him a link that showed there are actually FEWER federal employees now than twenty years ago. Didn’t slow him down much, but he at least had to concede the point that Obama has not “exploded” the federal government in terms of jobs.
Chip away my friends, facts have a well known liberal bias, keep shoving them in the face of conservatives.
liberal
@gene108:
The source of one of my favorite Onion headlines.
liberal
@magurakurin:
Would that it were so.
Don’t know about that, but the least they could have done is confiscated all the slaveowner plantations and given them to the slaves.
gene108
@feebog:
To right-wingers every government job is created by money “stolen” from you via taxation and therefore no government worker is capable of doing anything of value for society.
Adding more government jobs just means more “theft” from the private sector and therefore doesn’t actually improve the economy.
The whole social contract thingy about paying taxes to get services that help everybody has basically been voided in the minds of right-wingers.
FormerSwingVoter
@mk3872:
Easy. It’s good for Democrats, making it a minor change. If it were good for Republicans, it would be a “massive shift”.
JMS
My personal out of work tale is now about 2 months long. Not long by current standards, but enough to bring on daily low-grade anxiety and depression–and I have a working spouse and a severance package that takes me through the end of the year, so we’re “lucky”. But still–it’s one thing to hear that the job market isn’t like it used to be. It’s another to experience it first hand. No fun at all…
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
IMO, 8.2% isn’t all that bad, considering everything driving that number.
It’s strange how pundits (on either side) are attaching Obama’s re-election chances so strongly to this one number. It’s much more complicated than that.
Also, too: What if this really is the new normal, and we’ll never see unemployment under 7% again, ever? (Count me in as someone who believes this, for reasons I won’t get into here). If that’s the case, does that mean that we only get one-term Presidents for the rest of history?
Doubtful.
Maude
@JMS:
I do hope you get a job soon. The feeling of being a worm is awful. Everyone out of work feels the same way. You have company.
Keep your chin up.
Ruckus
@Shawn in ShowMe:
I have owned two small businesses in the past 35 years. Not once did I make a business decision about jobs with taxes in mind. It just is a not issue. If the taxes for your friends small businesses go up they will go up for their competitors as well. The playing field is still the same level for them all. It’s just bullshit excuses to blame someone else(the government!!)
In small business demand rules everything. You don’t got it, you don’t grow. It really is that simple.
Ruckus
@JMS:
Try doing it without a severance package(small business owner). Try doing it without unemployment insurance(self employed small business owner). Try doing it without a spouse and their possible income. Try doing all this on the north side of 60. Without friends I’d be sleeping under the stars eating out of your trashcan.
Those stupid supply side assholes forgot that the whole phrase is supply AND DEMAND.