No, it wasn’t a ‘blow-out’ jobs report. Inside the artificially bloated, trend-cycle adjusted headline number was the same old BLS con job and an economically devastating shortfall where it really counts. Namely, the US economy still has 2% fewer breadwinner jobs than it did 94 months ago at the pre-crisis peak in December 2007.
Actually, its worse. As is blindingly clear from the chart below, last month’s purportedly ‘awesome’ jobs report contained 1.4 million fewer breadwinner jobs than existed way back in the very first month of this century!
So that’s not an awesome labor market; its the measure of a sick economy.
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Indeed, the October pattern was even worse than normal. To wit, the reported number of high pay, high productivity jobs in mining, energy and manufacturing declined by 4,000, while the count of low-pay, part-time waiters and bartenders soared by 41,000.
Yes, the ‘Leisure and Hospitality’ category of the BLS survey is somewhat broader – – it also includes bellhops, hotel maids, parking attendants, hot dog vendors, stadium maintenance crews and the rest of the lodging and entertainment complex. These are all worthy and necessary endeavors, but they are mostly gigs, not jobs.
This post was published at David Stockmans Contra Corner on November 9, 2015.
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