American Elephants

Is there any straight talk anymore? The economy created 248,000 new jobs, slightly above the recent average of about 228,000, so the unemployment rate fell two tenths of a percent to 5.9 percent. Obama is crowing, because the unemployment rate is going down, but it is going down because 329,000 people dropped out of the labor force. There are 7.1 million people working part-time who would prefer to be working full time. How many of the people with part-time jobs hold two of the jobs?

President Obama went out to Northwestern University on Thursday to remind young voters of all the economic success he has had. The headline numbers may indicate health, but the economy simply isn’t that healthy. George Will, on last night’s Special Report with Bret Baier, was not exactly impressed.

The president went to the state of Illinois to brag about the economy. Illinois has 300,000 fewer jobs than it had in 2008. For the last four years in the state of Illinois, the number of new food stamp recipients has increased twice as fast as the number of new job recipients. He was speaking in Illinois on a college campus. He did not mention that 40 percent of recent college graduates are either unemployed or underemployed — that is, in jobs that don’t require college degrees — and one in three recent college graduates is living at home with their parents.

The jobs report is a snapshot, and provides several different ways of looking at the economy, so you can pull out the numbers that best make your case. Fewer people are participating in the labor force, and the rate remains at levels last seen in 1978. The share of the population employed is only 59 percent. Is the labor force now permanently smaller because of demographic changes and the shock of a slow growth recovery,  or can those long-term unemployed be lured back when the economy shifts into a higher growth gear that pays enough to make work more attractive than early retirement or government benefits? Real median net worth has declined from its peak in 2006 back to less than it was in 1989.

Better economic policies might be possible after the November election. Republicans have a chance to retake the Senate, which would end Majority Leader Harry Reid’s stranglehold on pro-growth measures that have passed the house only to be tabled in the Senate.

There’s regulatory relief, tax reforms like the repeal of the foolish medical devices tax, approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, and many more. President Obama wouldn’t sign them all, but he couldn’t afford to veto everything without paying a heavy political price by proving that he has been the cause of the gridlock he deplores.

We have to keep reminding people that the recession (‘the worst since the Great Depression”) technically ended over five years ago, in June of 2009. Over 58 percent of the people think that we’re still in recession. Some Recovery!