The Jobs Report, and America's Two Economies
At a time when corporate profits are through the roof, the Dow is flirting with 12,000, Wall Street paychecks are fat again, and big corporations are sitting on more than $1 trillion in cash, you’d expect jobs be coming back. But you’d be wrong.
The U.S. economy added just 36,000 jobs in January, according to today’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Remember, 125,000 are needed just to keep up with the increase in population of Americans wanting and needing work. And 300,000 a month are needed continuously for five years if we’re to get back to anything like the employment we had before the Great Recession.
In other words, today’s employment report should be sending alarm bells all over official Washington. This economy is still terribly sick. (Technical note: The official rate of unemployment fell to 9 percent from 9.4 percent, but that’s because more workers have left the labor market, too discouraged to continue looking for