By your reckoning a Doctor is in the service sector?
Let’s see…let’s keep this simple.
The Dr makes 100k a year. The burger flipper makes 10k.
100k+10k=110k
110k divided by 2 = 55k.
So by your math service sector averages 55k?
Been following this BS and just had to laugh out loud.
<typing very slowly> Do…you…have…a…cite…for…any…of…this…bull…shit…you…are…spewing…out…of…your…ass???
<in a more normal tone>
Do you have a cite, reeder, showing that 150k jobs are required to be created per month in order to keep the job market on an even keel? Can you back up the claim that we should subtract this figure from the present job’s created figure? Can you back up your claim that the majority of the service jobs created recently are in the ‘burger-flipper’ line with any kind of credible cite (since you seem obsessed with this)? Or any cite at all for ANY of the BS claims you’ve made so far?
-XT
So if you don’t create at least 150k jobs a month, you are going into the hole.
Agreed?
Reeder, are you even reading what I wrote? JOB GROWTH is JOB GROWTH. You don’t add or subtract ANYTHING to find out how many jobs the economy created, you just count up how many jobs the economy created. This seems like a pretty simple concept to me, and I’m wondering why you’re having trouble with it.
With me so far?
Now, the UNEMPLOYMENT RATE is the the percentage of people who would like to have a job but can’t find one. To discover if the UNEMPLOYMENT RATE is going up or down, you take the total number of jobs created, and subtract the increase in the number of people looking for a job. If the number of jobs created is less than the increase in demand for jobs, the UNEMPLOYMENT RATE will go up.
It is certainly possible to increase jobs at a rate slower than the increase in the job-seeking population. This does not mean you created fewer jobs, just that demand outstripped supply.
Still with me?
Now, the UNEMPLOYMENT RATE has declined since June of 2003 from 6.3% to 5.6%. That means fewer people who would like to have a job are still looking for work. So even by your bogus “subtract X from Y to make the numbers look bad” methodology, the economy is STILL improving at a very healthy rate.
5.6%, by the way, is one of the lowest unemployment rates of any country on the planet. Japan and Luxembourg are lower, I think, and that’s about it. Japan’s is lower because it has virtually zero immigration and a population that is not growing.
U.S. GDP growth is projected to increase faster than Europe, by about 2 percentage points. The European average for unemployment is about 8.8%. Canada’s unemployment rate just went UP to 8.4% from 8.2%. Canada LOST 20,000 jobs last month (again, this is not jobs created - immigration, but aggregate jobs). The U.S. economy is currently outperforming every economy on the planet as far as I know.
But you guys feel free to complain about how terrible it is, and how flawed Bush’s policies are. Keep trottting out that hoary old statistic about how there has been a net job loss since Bush took office - if there still is by election day, which is debatable. Because you know, it’s pretty much all you’ve got. By any HONEST measure, the economy is doing very well right now.
We lost 3 million jobs in 4 months? You have a cite for that?
Jesus Christ, Sam, don’t you ever get tired of posting misleading or false statements about the relative employment rates in Canada and the US?
As for the absolute rates, we’ve had that discussion before, where it’s been pointed out to you that some non-trivial part of the difference between the US’s 5.x% and Canada’s 7.x% is due to differing practices in drawing the line between ‘unemployed and looking for work’ and ‘unemployed and not looking for work’, but unless you get overly stubborn about things, I’m not going to tax the hamsters to find the thread.
Gorsnak: Oops. Brain slip. Mea Culpa. I’ve posted Canada’s unemployment rates before, and you’re right, it’s 7.4%. As for the 20,000 jobs lost figure, that was the March data, not April’s. I hadn’t seen the April numbers. You should have seen that I was using one month old data, because the link you offered says,
The 8.4 number probably popped into my head because I had been thinking of the European numbers.
The April numbers are certainly good news.
In any event, 7.4% is a hell of a lot higher than 5.6%.
cmason32:
The number sounds high to me, but I was using the Bureau of Statistics data that I linked to above. But in re-reading it, It appears that I used the non-seasonally adjusted data. My mistake. And I should have caught it because the number is just too damned big. That’s what I get for posting after just getting out of bed.
However, there’s still a big drop looking at the seasonally-adjusted total private payrolls. Here are the numbers:
Sept 2001: 110,302,000
Oct 2001: 109,917,000
Nov 2001: 109,535,000
Dec 2001: 109,312
Jan 2002: 109,123,000
There’s a drop of 1.2 million jobs from Sept 2001 to Jan 2002. This is no doubt due to major losses in some industries hit hard by 9/11 - tourism, airlines, large good sales, etc. In fact, from Jan 2002, the ‘trough’ was only about 900,000 more jobs over the next year and a half, and then the job recovery started.
Heh. Two questions, actually.
The first is, “assuming these numbers are as good as they seem, can they be attributed to the Bush tax cuts?” Conservatives argue that money is most productively spent and/or invested when its in the hands of private citizens – in particular the private citizens who earned it, and not in the hands of the government or redistributed by government. Liberals argue that government economic stimulus is just the ticket during a recession.
Under Bush, as it happens, the government did both. So I’ll leave that argument to people whose (Occam’s?) razors are sharp enough to split hairs.
The second question is, “are these numbers as good as they seem?” The answer to that is, yeah, they pretty much are.
Tell you what, though. I’m in the bond business, and what bond guys do for a living is worry. So I’ll tell you what I worry about as regards the employment numbers and some of the things related to them. I can’t tell you how much I weigh each worry or what, if anything, I’m doing about it – my employer is entitled to exclusive use of some of my alleged value-added. 
One of the things I worry about is that manufacturing weekly hours declined. That’s supposed to happen eventually as employers staff up to relieve the overworked people whose threat to rebel convinced the boss to hire in the first place, but there’s usually a bit of a lag to get people trained, etc. I dunno what that means. It could mean that BLS was slow catching up with the employment picture, it could mean that the manufacturing jobs were “easy” (and thus probably not particularly high-wage), it could mean just a statistical aberration – it didn’t appear in non-manufacturing jobs. I’ll be following that stat going forward to see if I can glean something not in the “headline” number.
I worry that inventories climbed (separate release). They didn’t climb by a particularly “worrisome” amount, but they climbed while the consumer is still spending like gangbusters and, again, before a lot of these new manufacturing jobs (and other jobs, like ship offloaders, truckers, etc.) have been on long enough for the people to get to full productivity. So I worry that productivity is so, SO high that a relatively small addition of workers can expand production more than the economy can absorb. This would make the job gains unsustainable if economic growth remains in the 4ish range. Any more than 5ish and I worry about overheating and inflation (see below).
Conversely, I continue to worry about commodity prices working their way through the system. Not just oil, as widely publicized, but almost all commodity prices are very high right now, and I’m seeing some indication that those prices are working their way through the system and in some cases even hitting the consumer. Consumers have been very smart shoppers for a while now and quickly substitute when faced with price increases. If that game is over, inflation is a real possibility. Bond guys hate inflation like Boston guys hate Bucky Dent. Inflation is as far back in people’s memories as a Boston World Series win, but it’s really, really bad. Anytime you’re not worried about deflation, you should worry about inflation.
I worry a little about debt. The consumer has a lot of debt (though the slow growth in March was a nice number), the government has a lot of debt. Companies actually did a really good job cleaning up their balance sheets during the recession. They’ll have to incur debt during growth to fund expansion and working capital. To make room in the system for that debt, I’d like to see consumers use some of their earnings to pay down debt and I’d like to see state and federal tax receipts continue to beat expectations. I’d also like to see some fiscal restraint by state and local governments rather than living off those improved tax receipts rather than growing spending or imposing new taxes, but I’d also like a pony. The debt in itself isn’t so bad – the economy has shown a good ability to grow out of it in the past – but it increases the risk of shocks to the system (say, a sudden spike in rates/credit crunch which vastly increases consumers’ monthly debt carrying cost without an increase in the debt itself or a Long Term Capital kind of thing).
So there it is (well, some of it) – despite my worries, it was an unequivocally good number, following an equally good one last month. It was a number which, if continued like I expect, eased my prior worries, which centered around “how the heck is the economy growing so fast without anyone getting a job? Is the data all bad or do I have to throw out my prior knowledge of how our economy works or what?”
I second what Gorsnak said. The method of collecting unemployment data in Europe is very different from in the US, so any comparisation is meaningless. For one, in many places in Europe there are entitlements available for those who register as unemployed, so most people do.
As for the job growth debate, I agree with Reeder. You have to factor in the number of persons entering the job market to determine how healthy the job market is. If not, one may end up in a situation where you have job growth all the time, yet are loosing jobs. Consider this: A given community with 100 jobs and no unemployment adds 10 new persons looking for job each month. In ten months unemployment is 50%.
However, latest figures show unemployment dropping 0.1 %, and jobs up by 288.000 (not factoring in those who didn’t look for a job this period, and those entering the job market). So looking better. My question is this: Have there been an increase in total hours worked? And how is the real estate market these days?
Well, you’re still wrong. We lost 13k jobs in March, not 20k. Cite Note that even that’s a bit misleading - from the article: “The details were ‘a bit more palatable beneath the surface,’ he added, with full-time employment rising by 2,900 positions and part-time jobs falling by 16,100.” There were 20k jobs lost in February.
Frankly, I was stunned during 02 and 03 when the Canadian job market kept churning out jobs. The past two years, while the American job market stagnated (until its recent dramatic turnaround), ours was still solid. Late last year, and through the winter, ours finally went soft, I think due to many combined factors - SARS and BSE and a stronger dollar and the weaker American economy finally catching up to us. I’m very glad to see our numbers on the rebound, since I’d sort of expected it to take longer.
In any event, I’m not at all convinced that the difference between 7.4% and 5.6% is anywhere near as significant as you think it is. As I mentioned, the methodology in collecting the figures differs. As well, neither number take any account of the number of “discouraged workers”, which, I think you will agree, are very relevant to the state of the job market, even though they don’t show up in the unemployment figures. The relative gap between Canadian and US unemployment figures has remained roughly constant over the past three years, during which time Canada has had large job gains, and the US has had large job losses. What does that tell you? It tells me to take raw unemployment figures with a shaker full of salt.
Sorry Sam, but I can’t let you get away with this one:
Nope.
If you want to argue about when the economy slowed down or dried up or whatever, you might argue that it happened in 2000. Personally, and I was working in the internet business, I believe that happened in the fourth quarter of 1999.
A “recession” on the other hand is a very explicit expression which - in regards to the national economy - can only be used when certain criterias are in place:
Alien:
Well, it’s not as clear as that:
In any event, whether it was the first two quarters of 2001 or the last quarter of 2000 is really irrelevant. Bush had yet to implement any economic policies, so you can’t lay the blame for the recession at his feet. The recession was a natural correction to a bubble economy. After the tech bubble and internet bubble collapsed, economic activity slowed, inventory levels rose, etc.
To be honest, I thought this had already happened. In any case, that would have been the 4th quarter of 200, not the third like I said. A bad morning for me, it seems!
Whoa. This sucker grew during the day. Don’t you guys have moms to attend to? Sheesh.
Anyway, way up there Sam said I was repeating every bogus claim that Dems would repeat.
NONE of them is bogus.
Every single one is factual. You think I don’t back up what I say?
Taking it one by one:
1 - The recession is dated by the NBER as starting in March 2001 and ending in November 2001. I’ve only cited to this a million times in these economics threads we’ve had. One more time: http://www.nber.org/cycles/cyclesmain.html. So no, my claim here is not bogus. I see on preview that the NBER is thinking of changing this, but as of now, as I write this, nothing bogus about it.
2 - Bad things happen in every economic cycle. Normally, a sharp dropoff like the one you cite for 9/11 would be followed by an equally sharp recovery on the other side. You will notice that Sept 2001 is in the middle of the above citied recession. See the early 80s for an example of what happens when a Bush isn’t in the White House at the end of a recession: job creation in 1983 was way faster than anything we’ve seen yet here. Three million on a base of 88 million employed, starting in Jan 83, two months after the end of the recession. Figures here: http://www.economagic.com/em-cgi/data.exe/blsce/ces0000000001.
Yes, the economy responds to inputs slowly. But not that slowly. November 2001 is two and a half years ago.
3 - My point is that the tax cuts have demonstrably not helped by any measure, since job creation is not just anemic, it’s non-existent. And yes, 600k on a base of 130 million is insignificant to the point of utter triviality. On the evidence, therefore, there’s a much stronger argument to be made that the tax cuts have destroyed jobs rather than creating them.
4 - The Fed hasn’t moved on interest rates at all yet. The market has set the rate on the 10 year that I cited. Your rebuttal is both meaningless and irrelevant.
Reeder
xtisme
[Moderator Hat ON]
Take it down a notch, please.
[Moderator Hat OFF]
[QUOTE=Reeder]
By your reckoning a Doctor is in the service sector
In which industry, then, would you reckon a doctor?? goods? manufacturing?
Pantom said:
Yes, and I thought they had already changed it. I hope we can both agree that whether it’s March 2001 or Nov 2000 is pretty much irrelevant, since Bush had not had time to do either good or harm by then.
Drawing historical analogies is pretty much irrelevant, since we’d never had anything like 9/11 before. The attack caused sweeping changes in behaviour patterns, investment patterns, consumer confidence, government spending, etc.
Also, the job creation in 2001 started from a base unemployment rate of what, 10.3% or something? This time, job creation was slower, but then job losses were also much less severe during this recession.
Then a loss of 2 million jobs is also insignificant to the point of triviality? Or is it a disaster of unimaginable proportions like the Dems would have us believe? You have to pick one or the other. You don’t get to claim that 2 million jobs lost are a disaster, but when almost 1/3 of those jobs come back in two months it’s ‘utterly trivial’.
As for whether job growth has been affected by Bush’s tax cuts, we really don’t have any empirical data, since we have a single data point. Economic theory suggests that leaving money in the hands of individuals will increase the flow of money and stimulate the economy, at least in the short term.
Please. The 10 year rate is set in part on speculation of what the Fed is going to do to interest rates. The mere threat of rate increases will drive up long-term rates. I don’t know why you’re arguing this, because there is a perfectly good anti-Bush argument here as well - long term rates should be affected by deficit spending. If the ten-year treasury is going up by more than can be expected by the threat of inflation and tighter money, then it could be the first sign of the negative consequences of Bush’s deficits. I pretty much expected rates to rise at some point because of it. You always have to pay the piper.
Sam:
Point 4 - Exactly what I said. The 10 year Treasury has gone from 3.11 to 4.76% on 600000 jobs. That’s 1/2 of 1 percent of the 130 million base. That’s evidence that the deficit, caused by the tax cuts, is indeed driving up interest rates.
The Financial Times ran a story a couple of days ago saying that Japan had stopped intervening in the currency markets in March. That rates have risen sharply in the past month or so shows that the Japanese were probably largely responsible for keeping market-set interest rates from climbing as a result of the deficit. Now that they’re out of the market, the market has moved up in response to that and to the job creation numbers. Simple matter of supply and demand: lots of debt being issued, and not as much demand to soak up the supply.
Point 3 - The point is not that the job loss was a disaster: I never said that. I said the 600k was insignificant. Which, as a percentage of the workforce, it is. See point 4 above.
Point 2 - Yes, job loss was much lower. That makes the fact that we haven’t yet made up for the jobs lost that much more shameful.
Point 1 - You’re right.