Jobs

So the jobs report came out and again it sucks. Steve Benen updated what was known as the bikini chart...



Kevin Drum updated it to zeroed on 150,000 jobs a month which is what we need to keep up with population growth. "As you can see, the last eight months, when the economy has supposedly been starting to recover, has actually been virtually flat. Relative to population growth, we've been generating no new jobs at all."



Matthew Yglesia adds two graphs on recent public vs private sector job growth.



So in spite of the Republican calls that Obama had grown the federal government and that's somehow stealing workers from the private sector, it's just not true. In fact, "The federal government should have stepped in when the recession hit with generous bailouts to states and municipalities to help stabilize their budgets. Instead, an austerity-minded congress has been letting state governments sink. Then a new crop of budget cutting governors came to office determined to slash spending while trying to avoid responsibility for unpopular cuts. The result was to push a lot of budget pressure downward onto local government, where we’re seeing huge cutbacks even thought he population continues to grow."