Jobs

Ezra Klein wrote about the jobs report yesterday 103,000 new jobs in December; unemployment down to 9.4 percent. "This jobs report is better than a bad jobs report. But it's not yet a good one."



There's more info here from The Hamilton Project of the Brookings Institute, New Decade, New Hopes for Job Growth, including this depressing graph:



Klein later posted more on The private recession vs. the public recession. "One of the important shifts in opinion that we've seen in the past few years has been the transference of the public's anger away from greedy bankers and other private actors who caused the recession and toward lazy unions and other public-sector workers who they feel haven't shared sufficiently in the pain."



"In my opinion, the public side of this chart is a triumph of policy: We had wanted to keep people from losing their jobs, and at least in the public sector, we were largely able to, though we've now stopped trying and are likely to see job losses through 2012. The private side is a failure: Neither the Federal Reserve's actions nor the stimulus did enough to moderate those job losses."

On Wednesday, Robert Reich had a lot more The Shameful Attack on Public Employees. "Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather deflect attention from corporate executive pay that continues to rise as corporate profits soar, even as corporations refuse to hire more workers...But the right’s argument is shot-through with bad data, twisted evidence, and unsupported assertions." He then debunks the lies that public employees earn more than private ones, that public-sector pensions and bargaining rights are to blame for state deficits.

"When times are tough, public employees should have to make the same sacrifices as everyone else. And they are right now. Pay has been frozen for federal workers, and for many state workers across the country as well. But isn’t it curious that when it comes to sacrifice, Republicans don’t include the richest people in America?"