Stagnant Jobs Report: Eight Years of Obama? Romney Says No

Today’s job report shows that unemployment is at 9.1%. Is that good news?

14% of small businesses laid off employees last month and they don’t plan to re-hire or expand. The number of workers who have stopped working and those who are engaged in part-time work, who want full-time work, push the job report numbers to 16%.

46 million Americans are on food stamps, the highest number in U.S. history, up 20 million from 2008.

Yesterday, the meltdown of the stock market saw the Dow Jones Industrial plummet 513 points – spooking investors across the world. The news today that hiring had slightly picked up in July caused the stock market to open higher this morning, but those gains were wiped out in just 25 minutes. Later in the day, only when the Italian Prime Minister unveiled an ambitious plan to help his beleaguered nation, the markets came up for a breather.

Here’s some of what Larry Doyle, (Business Insider), has to say:

Not so fast.

Let’s peel the onion a little deeper and get a real assessment of the health of our labor situation. To do that, let’s skip the verbiage provided by pundits and politicians and look at the hard numbers as provided in the Employment Situation Summary produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

What do we learn? Are you sitting down?

The labor participation rate continues to decline. This measure of people who are either employed or actively looking for work declined last month from 64.1% to 63.9%. Why? People are so discouraged that they have given up looking for work.

Please scroll to the bottom of the report to which I linked. We witness that the number of discouraged workers rose from 982, 000 in June (822, ooo in May) to a whopping 1,119,000 last month.

We had an increase of 137,000 discouraged workers last month and 297,000 discouraged workers over the last two months. Juxtapose those figures next to the increase in the non-farm payroll of 117,000 workers last month.

No, we did not hit a triple with this report. In fact, when we incorporate the discouraged workers into our review my ‘sense on cents’ indicates to me that our situation actually worsened.

(emphasis added)

Jobs Report: Too Little, Too Late?

Romney tweets:

When you see what this president has done to the economy in 3 years, you know why America doesn’t want to find out what he can do in 8less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyMitt Romney
MittRomney

Today’s unemployment report represents the 30th straight month that the jobless rate has been above 8% http://t.co/b5q8R0l #ObamaIsntWorkingless than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyMitt Romney
MittRomney

Reports show that the nearly 13.9 million unemployed have been without work for seven months or longer. The slight decrease in today’s numbers today are deceptive because 200,000 Americans simply quit looking for jobs; they form a new category – ‘discouraged workers’.

Analysts say that the 117,000 jobs created in July doesn’t keep up with population growth; 130,000 jobs are needed to keep pace. Even if 175,000 jobs were consistently created each month, the USA wouldn’t return to 5% unemployment until 2018.

UPDATE: S&P downgrades U.S. credit rating for first time!

Standard & Poor’s announced Friday night that it has downgraded the sterling U.S. credit rating for the first time.

The move came even though the Treasury Department said that it had found a math error in the firm’s calculations of deficit projections, according to a person familiar with the matter.

S&P decided to lower the AAA rating, held by the United States for 70 years, to AA+ after a bipartisan debt deal signed into law this week failed to assuage concerns about the nation’s growing spending.

Analysts have said a downgrade could increase the cost of borrowing for the U.S. government and lead to tens of billions of dollars in more interest costs per year. That could translate into higher borrowing for consumers and businesses, too.

UPDATE 2 – Romney tweet:

America’s creditworthiness just became the latest casualty of President Obama’s failed leadership on the economyless than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyMitt Romney
MittRomney

Obama isn’t working.

Time for Mr. Turnaround – Mitt Romney.

► Jayde Wyatt