Skimpy 54,000 U.S. Jobs Added in May

While Congress continues to deliberate over how best to reduce the national deficit, our volatile and indifferent economy added only 54,000 jobs during May — 178,000 fewer than were were created in April — and the official unemployment rate ticked back up to 9.1 percent. The federal focus on debt elimination has crippled the government’s ability to assist in the creation of jobs that would provide the reported 14 million victims of the Great Recession with basic social and financial security. –ARK

The New York Times:

The Labor Department reported on Friday that the United States added 54,000 nonfarm payroll jobs last month, following an increase of 232,000 jobs in April. May’s job gain was about a third of what economists had been forecasting.

… The biggest job gains were in professional and business services and in health care services, which have been growing steadily for years. State and local governments, struggling with severe budget shortfalls, continued to shed jobs. They are expected to keep laying off workers for months to come.

… While any job gains at all are welcome, the pace of job growth thus far has been too slow to reverse much of the damage wrought by the Great Recession, which has left nearly 14 million unemployed workers in its wake. For the last few months economists had been predicting that the economy was finally gathering steam and that a sharper bounce-back was imminent, only to be disappointed again and again.

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