Obama hails jobs report despite nearly 13 million unemployed
The Obama administration hailed the February jobs report, released by the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Friday morning, although the 227,000 net new jobs made only a slight dent in the army of nearly 13 million unemployed in America, including 5.5 million unemployed for more than six months. At this rate of net job creation, and with 125,000 people entering the job market each month, it would require 130 months—nearly 11 years—to put all those currently unemployed back to work. That is without taking into account future economic shocks from the US and world financial system. A more detailed breakdown of the jobs report suggests the flimsy character of the supposed economic recovery.
Paul Craig Roberts: No Jobs For Americans - Today (March 9, 2012) the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced that 227,000 new nonfarm payroll jobs were created by the economy during February. Is the government’s claim true? No. Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that 44,000 of these jobs or 19% consist of an add-on factor derived from the BLS’s estimate that 44,000 more unreported jobs from new business start-ups were created than were lost by unreported business failures. The BLS’s estimate comes from the bureau’s “birth-death model,” which works better during normal times, but delivers erroneous results during troubled times such as the economy has been experiencing during the past four years.