About 48,000 temporary workers for the decennial census were hired last month, while private payrolls jumped 123,000, the highest since May 2007.
Employment last month was also lifted by a snap back from February's weather-related losses.
Since December 2007, payrolls had contracted every month except last November, January, and now March.The bounce back in employment could take some pressure off Obama, who has made putting back Americans to work a top priority.
So that's good, it means that outside the Census hiring, there were still 100,000+ new jobs added by companies. That's the good news. The bad news is we're going to need numbers three times that size for years to make a dent in the sheer number of jobs lost compared to the expansion of America's job market. We've lost 8 million jobs. To get those back we're going to need to create that many jobs, plus the 150k a month we need to cover the growth in America's population. Today, we got maybe 10,000 of those 8.2 million jobs back. Temporarily.
Nothing short of a new Public Works Administration national infrastructure project will fix this.
You say "Nothing short of a new Public Works Administration national infrastructure project" but the fact of the matter is that Congress isn't going to do that or it would have happened already. Instead of just latching on to old models, which may be effective though politically not viable, why don't we talk more about things that can be done?
ReplyDelete