by Patrick Appel
Neil Irwin summarizes today’s report:
The 88,000 net jobs added in March, if that or a similar figure holds up through revisions, is a tragedy: Nearly four years into the economic recovery, with the unemployment rate still close to 8 percent, the nation recorded a month in which too few jobs were added to keep up with the growing American workforce (that number is more like 125,000). The headline read that the unemployment rate fell to 7.6 percent from 7.7 percent, but it was almost entirely for bad reasons. A whopping 496,000 people dropped out of the labor force, and 206,000 fewer people reported having a job, meaning that the proportion of Americans currently working actually ticked down, not up.
Kevin Drum makes the numbers look even worse:
The American economy added 88,000 new jobs last month, but about 90,000 of those jobs were needed just to keep up with population growth, so net job growth was actually slightly negative at -2,000 jobs. That’s terrible. It’s yet another spring swoon, but even earlier than usual. Ever since the end of the Great Recession we’ve been stuck in an odd pattern where employment growth looks promising in winter and then falls off a cliff in spring, but usually the dropoff doesn’t happen until April or May. We’re early this year.
Ryan Avent’s perspective:
[T]o some extent, this report simply drags expectations back to where they were early in the year, when it was anticipated that fiscal policy would meaningfully slow growth in the first half of the year but allow for an improvement later on. If surprisingly good numbers led some to believe that the American economy could shake cuts off without any effect, then perhaps they were a bit overoptimistic. Hopefully just a bit.
Tomasky fears that the worst is yet to come:
The sequester is not in these March numbers, the pros say. Too early. So that doesn’t necessarily augur well for April. Or May. There are going to be more job losses, particularly in the public sector. Good, you say? Question: How many public-sector jobs have been shed in the last three years? Answer is 648,000. That’s 18,000 every month. I don’t think this has ever happened since the birth of the welfare state, not under any Republican president or Democratic one.
Derek Thompson compares the stock market to the jobs market:
On Tuesday, the S&P 500 and the Dow closed at nominal all-time highs. Three days later, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the economy added a shockingly low 88,000 jobs in March. How bad is 88K? Well, put it this way, we’re theoretically in the midst of an accelerating recovery, and 88K new jobs per month won’t get us back to full employment for another 20 years, or more. I suspect that this will be one of the defining national stories of 2013, and beyond: The big, sustained, and accelerating gap between the working opportunities of most Americans and the profits produced at the top.
And Krugman asks why Washington is focused on budget cuts.
(Chart from Calculated Risk)
The Dish 