The Bureau of Labor Statistics has released its employment situation report for August 2010:
Nonfarm payroll employment changed little (-54,000) in August, and the unemployment rate was about unchanged at 9.6 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Government employment fell, as 114,000 temporary workers hired for the decennial census completed their work. Private-sector payroll employment continued to trend up modestly (+67,000).
Household Survey Data
The number of unemployed persons (14.9 million) and the unemployment rate (9.6 percent) were little changed in August. From May through August, the jobless rate remained in the range of 9.5 to 9.7 percent.
Essentially, very little changed month to month in any sector. I’m seeing quite a number of desperate attempts to construe this as good news. This is simply not what we would expect at this stage of a recovery and, barring other developments, it seems to me that we’re looking at the new normal.
Politically speaking, this is far from good news for Democrats. There will be only two more such employment situation reports between now and the mid-term elections in November and the trend is simply not moving in a good direction.
Another factoid that again points to “L.”
At best it is neutral news. We aren’t improving, but we aren’t getting worse. Looking real bad for the Democrats in November…real bad. I’d say it is already too late, I think there will be a massacre in that voters will reckon, rightly or wrongly, that they’ve had plenty of time to “fix the situation”, but haven’t. Given there is only one other choice, the Republicans will gain.
And depending on when the reports are released and the day of the election I’d argue there is only room for one more report. And lets look back to 1992. The recession was over well before the election. Things were starting to get better, just not in a robust way…and Bush was defeated and Clinton won. Granted this is no a presidential election year, but I think things are going to go very badly for the Democrats.
While it might be unlikely for the Republicans to take both houses, I wouldn’t find it all that surprising if they did.