I’ll give you a second to celebrate the March employment report before I spoil the party.
Finished with your festivities? Good. Now put away the balloons and the noisemakers and let’s drill down into the numbers.
The Labor Department announced that 192,000 new jobs were created last month. That was slightly better than Wall Street had been expecting earlier this week, but below the more optimistic 200,000 to 220,000 number that the economists had settled on by Thursday.
The unemployment rate — which is being investigated amid charges of data falsification — remained at 6.7 percent, while experts predicted a slight drop, to 6.6 percent. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics still hasn’t mentioned the investigation, a fact in itself that will eventually have to be investigated.)
You’ll read in everyone else’s story that job growth improved in March with better weather. Only 175,000 new positions were created in February and the general consensus was that March’s numbers would improve because snow finally ceased.
But the weather almost always gets better in March, so companies hire. And the Labor Department’s computers always account for that in their seasonal adjustments. The truth is that the improvement from 175,000 growth in February to 192,000 in March wasn’t really that great.
So after the normal seasonal adjustments, there wasn’t really that much of a gain from the weather.
Several experts have cheered that “total private” employment is now slightly above where it had been in early 2008, which, as we all can now recite by heart, was the beginning of what we nostalgically refer to as the Great Recession.
But that’s like talking about the good starting pitching the Mets have gotten in their first three games without bringing up the fact that they ultimately lost all three.
Back in January 2008, this country had a total of 138.365 million jobs. Even with private-sector employment back at the pre-recession level, the number of jobs in this country now is only 137.928 million.
Take out your calculator or do the math longhand, you come out with a deficit of 437,000 jobs.
So six years after the start of the downturn, our economy is still 437,000 jobs shy of where it had been, mainly because government at all levels has been forced to cut back in austerity moves.
Don’t get me wrong: A deficit of 437,000 is still an improvement. In February 2010, there were only 129.655 million jobs in this country — 8.71 million fewer than the 2008 peak. We are clawing our way back.
But none of those figures tells the whole story. While the US job market has been digging itself out of the hole for the past six years, it hasn’t been able to create the additional jobs it should have.
In other words, the economy needs a conservatively estimated 150,000 new jobs each month just to absorb the number of new people trying to find work for the first time.
So 12 months x 6 years = 72 months. And 72 months x 150,000 jobs/month = 10.8 million jobs that should have been created but weren’t.
So maybe you should be celebrating with some cheap wine instead of good champagne.
There is some good news in Friday’s figures. The job growth isn’t nearly strong enough to force the Federal Reserve into cutting back on the Wall Street-favorite drug, quantitative easing. So the stock market bubble should last a while longer.