Republican bounce-buster?

August jobs added 144,000 largest increase since May.

Unemployment rate falls to 5.4%

Twelve straight months of job growth.

America's payrolls picked up in August, with the economy adding 144,000 jobs, slightly less than economists were forecasting and highlighting the slow and uneven recovery in the labor market that jobseekers have braved.

The unemployment rate dipped to 5.4 percent last month from 5.5 percent in July. But the drop in the jobless rate in August came as people left the work force for any number of reasons, the Labor Department reported Friday. Economists were predicting the jobless rate to hold steady in August.


"As far as employment growth goes, it was okay. Nothing good, but nothing terrible," said economist Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors. "For jobseekers, it's an environment that provides them with some opportunities but finding jobs is still not going to be that easy yet."

If there isn't another 9/11.

Brand X wrote:

If there isn't another 9/11.

I thought Bush was supposed to be keeping us safe.

Is this an excuse for the next recession (in advance of when the GOP will be needing it) ?

I mean, why can't he just keeping blaming Clinton?

One of the major problems with the current jobs being created is that in many cases, they are not as high quality as the ones that were lost. Remember, when you think of this admin and jobs, these are the people who list working at McDonalds as a 'manufacturing job.'

I bet the number of salaried positions is still way, way down from what it was 4 years ago. And a lot of that isn't the slow economy - it's jobs encouraged to be shipped overseas by the current Admin.

Cycloptichorn

Last Friday's jobs report, which showed 144,000 new jobs were added to U.S. payrolls in August, deepened the mystery over lame job growth in recent years. The White House economic team loudly proclaimed victory, even though the Economic Report of the President for 2004 forecast that the number of payroll jobs would rise by at least 300,000 each month in this election year. Meanwhile, the household survey, which partisan economists have been pushing as a far better gauge of the true state of the labor market than the payroll survey, showed that the economy added a mere 21,000 jobs in August. (So much for antidisestablishmentarianism.)

Bush supporters have argued that recent job growth, pathetic as it has been, is due in part or in totality to the president's tax cuts. And it's difficult to make the counterargument that tax cuts cause job losses. But what if some portion of the recent shift in tax policies is partially to blame for the slow pace of job growth? This is a question that Maxim Group market strategist Barry Ritholtz has recently asked. And it's well worth pondering.

Job loss distortions continue (9/7)

By Brendan Nyhan

Democrats continue to spin the number of jobs lost under President Bush.

John Kerry's campaign and the Democratic Party have frequently attacked the White House by taking the total number of net private sector jobs lost under Bush and presenting the figure as if it represents the total net job loss for his presidency. The actual figure for net job loss since January 2001 including both the private and public sectors is 913,000 jobs according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released on Sept. 4, which revised the figure down from 1.1 million in August. However, Democrats have repeatedly cited private sector job losses instead, which declined from approximately 1.8 million to 1.6 million when the new data were released, without noting the important qualifier.

For instance, before the announcement of the new data, Kerry's running mate, John Edwards, referred on August 31 to "1.8 million jobs gone." His campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, made a similar statement in advance of President Bush's convention speech on Sept. 2, saying, "The last four years have been an abject failure: almost 2 million lost jobs, 5 million more without health care coverage, health care and energy costs going through the roof and a mess in Iraq that has cost America over $200 billion."

The talking point was exaggerated still further by Congressman Frank Pallone, D-NJ, on CNN August 31. Pallone claimed that "if you look at it over the last four years, the number of jobs that have been lost is over two million jobs" and later added that "We lost over two million jobs in that four-year period."

Since the new figures came out, Kerry has cited the 1.6 million figure at least twice without clarification. In his radio address Saturday, Kerry claimed that "Over the past three years, we've lost 1.6 million jobs in the United States." And he repeated it in a statement released today.

These are part of a long pattern of Democratic trickery with net job loss figures that we have documented on our website and in our book. The media need to clarify the facts each and every time Kerry or his supporters make one of these deceptive claims.