The nation’s tightly-regulated economy wheezed out only 162,000 new jobs in July, far below what is needed to restore the nation’s workforce to 5 percent unemployment promised by President Barack Obama in January 2009.
“At this rate, it would take six years to fill our 8.3 million jobs gap and get back to health in the labor market,” assuming immigration levels do not change, said an August 2 statement from Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute.
However, the unemployment rate dropped from 7.6 percent to 7.4 percent partly because yet more dispirited Americans dropped out of the labor force, she said.
“The share of the working-age population with a job did not budge, holding steady at 58.7 percent,” she said.
Roughly 200,000 Americans gave up looking for work in July.
But “once you take that [post-2008] labor force decline into account… the ‘real’ unemployment rate is [still] between nine percent and 10 percent,” said James Pethokoukis, an economic columnist and blogger for the American Enterprise Institute.
Worse, he added, the combined unemployment and underemployment rate, or the percentage of working-age Americans who want a full-time or part time job, is stuck at 14 percent, he said.
July’s gain of 162,000 jobs is partly offset by the monthly growth in the working-age population. The monthly growth of 90,000 is provided by the annual arrival of one million immigrants and four million American 18-year-olds, minus the number of Americans who die, retire or give up looking for work.
The Senate’s planned immigration bill, however, would add roughly 14 million workers over the next decade, if it becomes law.
Wages and average hours worked per week also nudged down, continuing a trend seen since Obama was inaugurated in January 2009.
GOP flacks showcased the lousy jobs numbers.
“Today’s headlines reflect the disappointment with Obama’s economy as 8.2 million Americans work part-time for economic reasons, Hispanic unemployment rises from 9.1 to 9.4 percent and 22.2 million Americans remain unemployed, underemployed or have given up looking for work,” said a statement from the Republican national Committee, titled “Obama’s Disappointment Economy.”
However, there’s no obvious relief in sight for Americans, partly because President Barack Obama is focused on gaining more progressive control over the economy’s health-care, energy, banking, education and labor sectors. He’s given no indication he thinks economic deregulation would spur the economy, and hasn’t acknowledged evidence that his big-government agenda might constrict job-growth.
“With the recovery entering its fifth year, we need to build on the progress we have made so far and now is not the time for Washington to impose self-inflicted wounds,” said a White House statement released after the job number were announced. “The Administration continues to urge Congress to replace the sequester with balanced deficit reduction, and promote the investments our economy needs to put more Americans back to work, such as by rebuilding our roads and bridges,” said the statement.
In fact, Obama and his progressive allies — plus GOP-tied business groups — are pushing for a massive increase in the supply of immigrant low-skill and high-skill labor that would compete against Americans for the few new jobs produced each month.
For example, the Obama-backed Senate immigration bill passed in late June would double the annual number of immigrants form roughly one million a year to two million for the next decade, said a report by Steve Camarota, the research director at the Center for Immigration Studies.
“If the bill passes, the U.S. will have to create more than 30 million new jobs in the next decade to accommodate both the new immigrants… and American job seekers,” he wrote.
That would require the creation of 250,000 jobs per month for a decade, just to maintain today’s 14 percent unemployment and underemployment rate.
An additional 100,000 jobs per month would be needed to drop the current unemployment rate back to pre-crash days sometime in 2021, some 12 years after Obama was inaugurated, according to an online calculator provided by the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project.
Throughout 2012, Obama’s economy produced an average of 180,000 jobs per month, or half the level — 100,000 plus 250,000 — that would be needed to gradually lower the unemployment rate to pre-crash levels over the next decade, if the Senate’s immigration bill becomes law.