Tuesday, July 06, 2004
Dubya's Boom Blip
After a few months of mediocre-to-okay jobs growth, the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that in June only 112,000 new jobs were created ... not enough even to keep up with population growth, let alone make up for the massive numbers of Dubya-era job losses. If I'm remembering right, this is on the heels of their announcement that last week's first-time unemployment claims increased, to 351,000. Oops.
What's worse is that the percentage of Americans who are employed has fallen from about 64.5% at the end of Clinton's 2nd term to about 62% now. Not only are there over a million fewer jobs than there were 4 years ago, there are about 5 million more people (potentially) in the workforce today - so we're really in a 6 million job hole, not 1 million.
Paul Krugman gives the details in his column today. For even more detail, with groovy graphs and all, see Brad DeLong's June 23rd blog post on the topic.
After a few months of mediocre-to-okay jobs growth, the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that in June only 112,000 new jobs were created ... not enough even to keep up with population growth, let alone make up for the massive numbers of Dubya-era job losses. If I'm remembering right, this is on the heels of their announcement that last week's first-time unemployment claims increased, to 351,000. Oops.
What's worse is that the percentage of Americans who are employed has fallen from about 64.5% at the end of Clinton's 2nd term to about 62% now. Not only are there over a million fewer jobs than there were 4 years ago, there are about 5 million more people (potentially) in the workforce today - so we're really in a 6 million job hole, not 1 million.
Paul Krugman gives the details in his column today. For even more detail, with groovy graphs and all, see Brad DeLong's June 23rd blog post on the topic.
