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Ear to the Ground

Job Market in a June Swoon

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Posted on Jul 8, 2011
Flickr / swanksalot (CC-BY-SA)

A measly 18,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy in June, far below expectations for a rise of close to 90,000, and the unemployment rate ticked up to 9.2 percent. The numbers are a reality check, indicating just how poorly the job market has been making up for the more than 8 million jobs lost during the recession.  —BF

The New York Times:

The report said that 14.1 million people were out of work in June, among them 6.3 million who have been jobless for six months or longer. In May, the total number of unemployed people was reported as 13.9 million, with the long-term unemployed at 6.2 million.

The numbers showed the continuing challenges of adding jobs to the economy even at a rate that keeps pace with population growth, two years after the official end of the longest economic downturn since the Great Depression.

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oddsox's avatar

By oddsox, July 9, 2011 at 3:27 pm Link to this comment

Believe it or not, June’s 9.2% unemployment rate is nearly a point BETTER than at this time during Ronald Reagan’s first term:
http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate.jsp?fromYear=1981&toYear=1990

Of course, we were down to 7.2% by Election Day 1984 and 5.4% when Reagan left office in January 1989.

If we can match those two numbers, I’ll vote for Obama again in 2012 and lobby to repeal the 22nd Amendment by 2016.

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By TDoff, July 9, 2011 at 8:14 am Link to this comment

The US employment situation would be much more accurately defined and thus easier to understand if the statistics were separated into two sections:

1. New jobs created by increased demand for goods and progressive stimulus efforts, and

2. Existing jobs, public and private, eliminated by conservatives and their practices, especially the amoral hoarding and manipulation of wealth created by shrewd investments in the purchasing and renting of politicians for the purpose of creating a distorted US economy, particularly with regard to personal and corporate taxes.

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By Rodney, July 8, 2011 at 2:32 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

The owners of this country has decided not to hire.
More with less is permanently here to stay. New
workers cost to much to train and hire. Add in
benefits and it’s better to work the shit out of the
ones who are there.I see it at my job.Workers eat too
much of corporate profits and executive bonuses. The
only way the will hire is if they can give wages that
are lower than what the position usually pays and
eliminate most of the benefits. That’s why most of
our jobs are being sent overseas. Once they have
finished destroying the middle class and humiliating
the American worker by permanently lowering their
wages and benefits, then jobs will return. That won’t
happen until the get Obama out of the White House
which is their main goal anyway.

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