The Bureau of Labor Statistics has released its employment situation report for September 2010:
Nonfarm payroll employment edged down (-95,000) in September, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 9.6 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Government employment declined (-159,000), reflecting both a drop in the number of temporary jobs for Census 2010 and job losses in local government. Private-sector payroll employment continued to trend up modestly (+64,000).
A little farther down is the bad news:
The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) rose by 612,000 over the month to 9.5 million. Over the past 2 months, the number of such workers has increased by 943,000. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job. (See table A-8.)
About 2.5 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force in September, up from 2.2 million a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. (See table A-16.)
Among the marginally attached, there were 1.2 million discouraged workers in September, an increase of 503,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.3 million persons marginally attached to the labor force had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities. (See table A-16.)
This report is the last employment situation report before the midterm elections and it’s not the good news that we all and particularly Democrats running for re-election might have hoped for. Certainly it’s better than further declines but it’s not precisely the stuff of which high animal spirits are made.
Happy Days Are Here Again was the campaign song for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s successful 1932 presidential campaign in the depths of the Depression. Although “increase aggregate demand” may be a rollicking theme for the gang of merrymakers down at The Harvard Club, I doubt it’s going to boost the mood of the country. What in the world has happened to the Democrats these days, to all of us? From the lugubrious tone, predisposition to blame others for our misfortunes, and tendency to apologize at the drop of a hat you would think that we have become a nation of Uriah Heeps.
Heep’s primary motivation was greed.
Update
Felix Salmon comments on the report:
The U.S. does not have the luxury of waiting indefinitely for job growth to resume. Already we’re at the absolute limit: any longer, and most of the unemployed will be long-term unemployed and, to a first approximation, unemployable. This country simply can’t afford an unemployable underclass of the long-term unemployed — not morally, not economically, and not fiscally, either.
I would like to quibble with Mr. Salmon about one thing, however. State and local governments are not running out of money. Work rules in state and local governments encourage layoffs rather than aligning the compensation of public workers to realistic levels based on actual revenues.
Money continues to pour into state and local government coffers albeit at lower levels than in 2007. Here in Illinois total state revenue was around $58.5 billion. In 2009 it was around $43 billion and in 2010 about $41 billion. $41 billion is not nothing. It’s just substantially less than $58 billion. Illinois, a state in which both houses of the legislature and the governor’s mansion are controlled by Democrats, has elected not to increase taxes. But it has also elected not to cut pay. Its alternative is to cut jobs.
I might add that the greatest fiscal problem for most state and local government is healthcare spending. But we’ve reformed healthcare, haven’t we?
