Posted on 02/05/2005 8:20:56 AM PST by Dubya
WASHINGTON ---- President Bush has narrowly escaped becoming the first president since Herbert Hoover to lose jobs on his watch.
Questions about the health of the nation's jobs market dogged Bush throughout his first term, and Democrats used the issue in the presidential campaign. Ultimately, the jobs situation and the economy weren't enough of a concern to deny Bush a second term.
All told, the economy generated a net gain of 119,000 jobs during the president's first term in office.
In January, America's payrolls grew by 146,000, a sluggish pace suggesting that companies are reluctant to bulk up their work forces and highlighting the challenges faced by job-seekers. The unemployment rate fell to 5.2 percent as people left the job market.
The newest employment snapshot, released by the Labor Department on Friday, showed improvements in the job market still coming slowly, even though the economic expansion has become more firmly entrenched.
Companies, keeping a close eye on profit margins, are still showing caution in hiring as they cope with high energy bills and soaring health-care costs for workers, economists said.
"The economy is recovering, but it is still difficult for people looking for a job to find work," said Lynn Reaser, chief economist at Banc of America Capital Management. "Companies are only cautiously putting out the help-wanted signs."
The overall civilian unemployment rate declined to 5.2 percent in January, from 5.4 percent in December, as people left the job market for any number of reasons. January's jobless rate was the lowest since September 2001.
On Wall Street, though, January's lackluster payroll figure helped to send stocks sharply higher on investors' hopes that the Federal Reserve might be less aggressive in raising interest rates. The Dow Jones industrials gained 123.03 points to close at 10,716.13.
Meanwhile, the share of the U.S. population working or actively seeking a job dropped in January to 65.8 percent, the lowest reading since June 1988.
The 146,000 gain in payrolls in January fell short of economists' forecasts for an increase of around 200,000. Jobs gains for December came in at 133,000, down from an initial estimate of 157,000.
"The labor market climate has yet to fully defrost," said Ken Mayland of ClearView Economics.
January's job gain pushed total payrolls to 132.57 million. That was just above the level when payroll employment peaked in February 2001, the month before the economy fell into recession.
Bush said he was pleased with the employment figures.
"That's a good sign. More people are going to work around our country," he said. "But we shouldn't be content. I'm looking forward to working with the members of Congress to create the conditions for continued economic expansion."
However, Bush's critics, including Democrats and labor unions, pointed to Friday's employment figures as further evidence the president's economic policies are flawed. "The recovery still has a long way to go to deliver satisfactory gains in jobs and wages," said Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney struck a similar note. "America's working families are still struggling to gain their footing on the slippery slope of today's labor market."
Workers' average weekly earnings dipped to $535.16 in January, from $535.73 in December. There were 7.7 million people unemployed in January with the average duration of 19.3 weeks without work, the same as in December.
Federal Reserve policy-makers' assessment of the labor market is that "conditions continue to improve gradually." On Wednesday, they boosted short-term interest rates for the sixth time since June.
Economists believe rates probably will go up again at the Fed's next meeting on March 22. But there could be a pause if economic data were to suggest a weakening in the economy.
Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, speaking in London on Friday, didn't discuss interest rate policy or the jobs situation. But he struck a somewhat encouraging note on a possible improvement to the United State's yawning trade deficits.
Greenspan said a variety of factors from a weaker dollar to tougher budget discipline in Congress may finally start to restrain the deficit's explosive growth.
In January, job gains in the service sector were partially offset by job losses at factories and in construction.
Financial services employment increased by 21,000 jobs in January. The leisure and hospitality sector added 20,000 jobs. Education and health services gained 35,000 jobs. Retailed picked up 19,200 jobs.
Manufacturers, however, lost 25,000 jobs in January. Construction companies cut 9,000 positions.
Economists, however, are hopeful job growth will do better.
"I'm not totally gloomy about the outlook. The labor market has traction; what it needs is more momentum," said Bill Cheney, chief economist at John Hancock Financial Services.
Great biased MSM headline!
http://polipundit.com/index.php?p=6327
Gloomy
5.2 percent = the U.S. unemployment rate, as of Jan. 2005.
On the other hand, there’s this:
5.3 percent = the unemployment rate back in Jan. 1997.
Oh, the humanity.
Data: Here. http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?bls
I saw some idiot yesterday on MSNBC grudgingly admit President Bush is NOT the first president since Hoover to lose jobs on his watch. She looked as if she had swallowed a carp.
5.2 percent = the U.S. unemployment rate, as of Jan. 2005.
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Yes, the leftist MSM ignores the real facts, and spins to the negative. As usual. They are losers, just spreading hate and discontent, with their lies and half-truths.
No kidding! Bush AVOIDS the label, as if he's running down dark streets to escape it. By now we should be used to the bias, but things like this still make me shake my head.
Hoover didn't prop-up the economy by expanding the federal payroll with over $1.7 trillion of deficit spending.
this makes me so dammm mad!!!
Talk about biased headline.
Don't just shake your head- write letters and email to these turds.
ASSOCIATED PRESS SUCKS
Say it with me, buddy:
Four more years!!!
Four more years!!!
Four more years!!!
Four more years!!!
Four more years!!!
Four more years!!!
Four more years!!!
Four more years!!!
Biased headline? The whole story is biased. Good news like the low unemployment rate is due to people giving up the job search, according to this writer. It's a total hack job!
Oh heck no! There's absolutely NOOOOOOOOOOOO liberal media bias. None whatsoever. Nothing to see here. Move along.
No thanks, chanting mindless mantras is not my style.
It still makes me mad too. But we really can take some comfort in realizing we withstood this gabage throughout Bush's first term and we STILL won. People don't fall for the crap anymore. I don't get as angry as I used to because for the first time in my life, I can see that most of the public has turned on the press. And the tide is moving entirely our way.
Where do I find an annual job growth/loss graph going back to the early 20th century? I searched for about an hour yesterday and couldn't find squat. I suspect and interesting story would appear in terms of administration changes.
Willie, I would accept that as a valid criticism of Bush from most freepers. However, considering you are constantly promoting large-scale boondoogle projects on FR, you are hardly being politically or intellectually consistent here.
It's actually becoming fun to see how bad they can get, and collect the worst examples.
We must have been mislead by --
expanding the federal payroll with over $1.7 trillion of deficit spending!!!
expanding the federal payroll with over $1.7 trillion of deficit spending!!!
expanding the federal payroll with over $1.7 trillion of deficit spending!!!
Only problem is that there's no sense or rhythm to it. If we're going to do something, let's do it right:
Four more years!!!
Four more years!!!
Four more years!!!
Four more years!!!
Four more years!!!
Well, I'm a statistic. I lost a job I loved on "Bush's watch."
Do I blame Bush? Hell no! I blame the selfish socialist I was working for who left his wife and family of 33 years for a bimbette! His actions caused his wife to fight tooth and nail to keep the company she'd spent thirty years of her life building, and she had to liquidate my shop to pony up the cash to get "the man who done her wrong" paid off and out of the picture. I would've done the exact same thing, had I been in her shoes.
You know, there are stories just like mine behind anyone who's ever lost a job. And you know what? I was lookin' for a job before I found that one, LOL! I can do it again.
The MSM will never convince me that life is Doom and Gloom. Life is a journey, an adventure and a blast! It's up to us each to chart our own course. (Though a strong economy and a GREAT leader in the White House helps greatly, LOL!)
Really good point, Diana. You know, EVERY company, town, state and country has its share of professional helpless-victims/gripers/complainers/BLAMERS, and they have their h/g/c/B representatives in Washington still skewing the progress and screwing things up.
"As one can plainly see from the following chart, unlike the data depicted by the Establishment Survey, the Household Survey shows an increase of 2.5 million jobs since Mr. Bush took office, and a 4.5 million rise from the January 2002 recession low." -- from Tech Central Station, HERE
The next President will have that honor. The baby boom generation is retiring.
Hey, Coop, say it with me: The principle generator of new jobs in the U.S. is...drumroll...retail and temporary agencies. And do you want fries with that?
Gee Willie what a surprise - a negative Bush comment. Did you notice thw attack on America during the Hoover administration like the one on 911? That one day cost America 80 Billion dollars + 3,000 dead. The cost of WWII was high too, but we paid it.
Gee, that's awfully expensive.
That must be why Dubya is so committed to replacing those lives with cheaper, illegal immigrants.
I only had the stomach to read the first two paragraphs. Before that I saw it was AP and knew what to anticipate.
MSM/DUhmmie Myth.
ROTFLMAO!!! Dude, that is ALL you do on this forum.
Why do you assume temp agencies are producing bad jobs. A lot of companies hire thru a temp agencies so that it is easy to eliminate the bad employees before they have achieved permanent status. A year ago, my wife took a temp job. She is now running a dept. of 20 people.
If all you want to see is gloom, it's easy to generalize and produce democrat soundbites that sound gloomy. But like most democrat soundbites, they are misleading, at best.
And, as has been pointed out to you backyard bunker types many times, professional services are included in those job growth categories. Which might explain why incomes still go up, huh?
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Narrowly? By the time he leaves office he will have created twice as many REAL jobs as Clinton did BUBBLE jobs.
146,000 new jobs, yet the writer breathlessly concludes that unemployment only went down because people gave up looking for work.
Is it childish ignorance or outright bias?!
Democrats are deeply saddened.
Here, the poor author mistakenly writes of only one deficit, whereas Chairman Greenspan was talking about *two* deficits. The trade deficit will be reduced by the falling Dollar; the federal budget deficit will be reduced by tougher Congressional budget discipline (per Greenspan).
Is this mistake of writing about only *one* of two deficits the result of puerile ignorance, or willing bias?
Uh... yes!!
Well in the HORRIBLE Bush economy, I was able to find a good paying job as a management consultant, after turning down another job. CAPITALISM RULES!
You can denigrate those jobs all you want, but some people WANT those jobs as well as NEED them. If you take a look at the temp job population, you're likely to find that it is heavily skewed toward two types of folks. One group is young people a year or two out of college, who do not yet know what kind of job they want to do. They're using the temp industry as a stop-gap measure until they are offered a GREAT job, in their eyes, or until they've decided the ultimate course of their lives. Seems like a good plan to me; at least they're working and paying taxes. Another group is the pool of people who want to have some income, but don't want to make a commitment to any one company. They have the luxury of not having to work; they're using the temp industry to have some extra money, or in some cases, to try out new jobs as they make their way back into the workforce after a time out of it; specifically women who are returning to the world of paid work after having raised their children.
As for retail, someone has to do those jobs so that others can have places to shop for the goods they want to buy. No one is forcing anyone into any job, folks choose the jobs they have. Sometimes there are fewer choices, sometimes more, a lot depends on the economic and business cycles. Sometimes folks stay in these jobs for their whole lives because there's no pressure to move up, and probably no requirement for further education. Some folks use these jobs as stepping stones to something better, either within that retail business, or by using their spare time to educate themselves to be prepared to take an opportunity to move up when it presents itself. It all depends on the ambition of the individual.
That's the beauty of America; the workforce is only static if it wants to be. There is almost always an opportunity for a better job, or the opportunity to create one for oneself.
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Companies, keeping a close eye on profit margins, are still showing caution in hiring as they cope withAhhhhhh, that's betterhigh energy bills and soaring health-care costs for workersunion slugs, illegals with phony social Security Cards and assorted protected minority groups who will SUE their pants off if discharged for ANY reason, and who can't spell w-o-r-k, let alone do any, economists said.
Definitely both. Household surveyers often find people who say they've quit looking for work. That's put in one report. Other reports may tabulate whether they're employed now (yes) and/or do NOT tabulate answers to: did you start your own businesses, if so how many, and since your husband got a raise, why did you decide you could afford to stay home with the kids?
Supposedly the unemployment rate keeps falling because people have given up looking for jobs. The real answer is quite simple: Numbers are being mixed and matched from different sources with little notion of how they are calculated.The Department of Labor provides two different sets of labor market statistics: the establishment survey and the household survey. The establishment survey polls 400,000 companies on how many employees they have. The household survey questions 60,000 households each month on whether they have jobs and whether someone is looking for one.
There are a number of technical reasons that the two surveys can yield different numbers. For example, people with more than one job will be counted multiple times in the establishment survey. On the other hand, the self-employed are only counted by the household survey.
The “jobless recovery” picture is painted using the household survey for calculating the unemployment rate but using the establishment survey for the number of jobs created. The household survey can be used for both measures as it, too, provides estimates on the total number of people employed.
But the two surveys have implied dramatically different changes in employment. Over the entire Bush administration, the household survey found that about 1.2 million new jobs have been created. By contrast, the establishment survey shows a net loss of 1.7 million.
Why the difference? The number of companies does not remain fixed. Old firms die and new ones are born. The establishment survey finds out about the company deaths quickly, but it takes longer to learn about births. The current list of firms surveyed excludes firms started over the last two years. What the establishment survey shows is that total employment in older firms has changed little over the last three years. It missed the growth in new jobs among new startups and self-employment.
Not surprisingly, the Democrats choose to emphasize the establishment numbers. But even conservative columnist George Will recently asked: “Do we even have to think whether these jobs are coming back?”
Numbers can be confusing. The establishment survey is much larger and some claim it is more comprehensive. But the household survey is still quite large and it has always been the “official” measure for calculating the unemployment rate. The issue isn’t survey size, but whether the survey is biased — whether it adequately covers all types of employers. The establishment survey ignores new startup businesses and we have had an usually large expansion in this category over the last couple of years.
By only referring to the establishment survey numbers, the media have implicitly taken sides in the debate, albeit perhaps unknowingly. A simple Nexis computer search of the news media from Feb. 1 to March 9 finds 734 stories using the term “jobless recovery” to describe the U.S. economy.
In recent weeks, news stories carried such headlines as “Bush Jobless Recovery Hits Middle Class” (New York Daily News) to “On Job Front, ‘Recovery’ Meaningless” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) to “Where are the Jobs?” (CNN). Given this rhetoric, it hard to believe that the current 5.6 percent unemployment rate is lower than the average unemployment rates during the 1970s (6.4 percent), 1980s (7.3 percent) or 1990s (5.8 percent).
All is not lost. Eventually the establishment survey numbers will be adjusted for all the new startups that have sprung up during the last couple of years. Unfortunately, much of this won’t be reported until after the 2004 elections when all but a handful of historians and economists will pay attention.
The U.S. continues its slide into the Third World.
Let's put all of the above into context.
Germany currently has 5 million officially unemployed, 2 million on government welfare programs that don't qualify them as being listed as unemployed, and another 600,000 in government "training" programs that aren't counted as being unemployed (they get listed as being students, one presumes). So in tiny Germany (it's smaller than our state of Montana), with a population of a mere 82 million people, you've got 7.6 million unemployed.
In the U.S., with 300 million citizens, you've only got 7.7 million unemployed.
Now *that's* context!
OK, lets flip over to the author's other point. Keep in mind that she is comparing President Bush to all other Presidents. Well, how do American weekly average earnings compare now under President Bush to under our previous President?
1996 = $260.82 (in 1982 constant inflation-adjusted Dollars)
2004 = 278.16 (in 1982 constant inflation-adjusted Dollars)
January 1997 Average Hourly National Wage was: $12.27
January 2005 Average Hourly National Wage was: $15.88
So for a 33.7 hour average workweek (average paid hours on jobs after substracting any unpaid sick days, vacation days, holidays, leave, etc.), we've got $535.16 in 2005 versus $413.50 in 1997 (the first years of the last two Presidents' 2nd terms).
$535 versus $413
Or in inflation-adjusted 1982 Dollars:
1997 $261 versus
2005 $278
So U.S. unemployment is down, overall payrolls have increased (i.e. more jobs), and wages, even after compensating for inflation, are UP.
Now *that's* context!
http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/wages/index.htm
And, Bush won't even be among those after Hoover to have a loss of employment during his term. The Dems/MSM must hate this news. They were gleefully looking forward to the statistic and right under the wire we produce even more jobs than needed. This with a terror attack, market and corporation scandals, and a WOT.
This only proves beyond all doubt that Bush grew "the federal payroll with over $1.7 trillion of deficit spending" --how else could Bush have made things so good? </ sarcasm> Actually this is the same kind of logic used by a Marxist who once argued that the mere fact that none of Marx's predictions had yet come true is absolute proof of how very far-sighted Marx really was!
ROTFLMAO!!!!
http://polipundit.com/index.php?p=6335
The Great Divider
January 1997:ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/news.release/History/empsit.020797.news
Unemployment rate among African-Americans = 10.8.
Unemployment rate among Latinos = 8.3.
On the other hand, there’s this:http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
January 2005:
Unemployment rate among African-Americans = 10.6.
Unemployment rate among Latinos = 6.1.
Gee, those stats were not front-and-center in today’s San Francisco Chronicle.
Hmm, I wonder why . . .
-- Jayson
Gee, those stats were not front-and-center in today’s San Francisco Chronicle.
Hmm, I wonder why . . .
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Leftist MSM = hide the TRUTH, print the LIES and SPIN.
PS if your facts did not reflect the true nature of America, how do we explain the growth in the size of homes from 1,200 sq. ft to over 2,200? How do we expalin the number of Autos and other perks of life? Why are cruise ships full of Americans all over the world?
Context BUMP!
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Every silver lining has a cloud.