There have been 11 straight months of job growth and 12 months of growth out of the last 19. The employment rate has also dropped a tenth of a point to 5.5%.
Recovery but a slow one. Whatever we do, let's dare not remember the fact that we were ATTACKED less than three years ago and the impact that had on an already poor economy.
From factcheck.org This is the largest sustained loss of jobs since the Great Depression. On average, that’s roughly 106,000 private sector jobs lost every month – the worst under any president in 58 years. The number of unemployed workers has risen to over nine million, and the unemployment rate has jumped from 4 percent at the end of 2000 to 6.1 percent in September 2003. The rate would be much higher if the underemployed and those who have given up looking for work were included.
500,000 new jobs is better than none, but still disappointing. Bush promised us 5.5 million new jobs by the end of 2004 when he ran in 2000. The Economic Policy Insitute also has some interesting graphs on the subject at this website: http://www.jobwatch.org/ Note several important points: "Job growth stalls in last two months, underlining failure of tax cuts as job creation strategy . . . since the tax cuts took effect, there are 2,565,000 fewer jobs than the administration projected would be created by enactment of its tax cuts. As can be seen in the chart below, job creation failed to meet the administration's projections in 11 of the past 13 months" "Greatest sustained job loss since the Great Depression Since the recession began 40 months ago in March 2001, 1.2 million jobs have disappeared, representing a 0.9% contraction. To put this performance in historical perspective, . . . In every previous episode of recession and job decline since 1939, the number of jobs had fully recovered to above the pre-recession peak within 31 months of the start of the recession. Today's labor market would have 6.2 million more jobs if employment had grown by the same 3.7% average that characterized the last three recession cycles. As for who has been hurt most, private-sector jobs have fared worse than public-sector jobs. Jobs in the private sector have dropped by 1.8 million since March 2001, representing a 1.6% contraction."
