"I want to be clear, that probably the jobs picture is not going to improve considerably -- and it could even get a little bit worse -- over the next couple of months," Obama told CNN chief national correspondent John King in the interview, conducted Friday.And quite frankly we need more than 150,000 a month growth, we really need something in the neightborhood of 300K new jobs a month to get the unemployment rate down. All 150K new jobs a month would mean is that the unemployment rate would remain where it is, that's the break-even point.
Obama explained that he believes the economy will be creating jobs through the end of 2009 -- but not enough to keep pace with population growth nor to make up for steep losses in employment that occurred earlier this year.
"I think we'll be adding jobs, but you need 150,000 additional jobs each month just to keep pace with a growing population," the president said. "So if we're only adding 50,000 jobs, that's a great reversal from losing 700,000 jobs [a month] early this year -- but, you know, it means that we've still got a ways to go."
He called the issue "something that I ask every single one of my economic advisers every single day, because I know that ultimately the measure of an economy is, is it producing jobs that help people support families, send their kids to college?""That's the single most important thing we can do," Obama said.
And that kind of job growth simply isn't going to happen. The reality is we're going to be in the economic doldrums for several years. Steve Clemons takes Obama to task on this:
In January and February of this year, the President committed himself to a jobs creation plan of approximately four million jobs in created or saved jobs by 2011. We are no where near on that course. In February, Paul Krugman warned that the so-called economic recovery plan tweaks were already reducing the job-creating element of the stimulus package by between 600,000 and 1.2 million jobs.Agreed. A jobless recovery at this point is a policy choice of Wall Street over Main Street. Obama's economic team is making things great for bankers and stockbrokers and the burdened rich who have to put off their mani/pedis to a barbaric monthly basis rather than bi-weekly. The rest of us? We're searching for ways to spice up our ramen noodles and watching Hormel Foods put in significant earnings numbers because Spam and Dinty Moore sales are way up.The economy is in lousy shape still -- though we are going to see robust third and fourth quarter upswings in the GDP -- but this is GDP growth without job growth. . .and that is what economic advisers to Obama who are Wall Street-centric have scripted.
Lawrence Summers needs to get out of the White House more -- and get to something other than fancy DC parties where folks fawn over him. He needs to go to heavily impacted communities where foreclosures and joblessness are high and needs to deal with the fact that the reflation of Wall Street has come at the expense of generating balance in the lives of average Americans.
A GDP recovery, which we are going to get -- is something that the President of the United States should be apologizing for and for which he should be holding his economic team accountable. An uptick in GDP without growth in employment should not be treated as positive news.
The outcome we are getting on a no-jobs recovery was a "policy choice" - and we need to make better choices from this point forward.
And for the record, diced Spam fried up, a can of Hunt's sauce, and a box is spaghetti is two dinners worth of food for $4.50.
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Diced or... well, mashed Spam (I usually take a potato masher to it, one or two eggs, about six slices of bread, and a pound or two of cooked macaroni is always a great dish in my house. It makes Kitty happy.
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