Economy Update: It's Still Bad
The economy added a whopping 54,000 non-farm jobs last month, and the official unemployment rate is now back to 9.1 percent. That's really, really bad.
You need about 150,000 added jobs each month to keep up with population growth, and this may kill off whatever momentum was fake-growing after three months of additional job figures averaging 220,000 per month. The recession killed somewhere around 10 million jobs, so you do the math: It will take one hundred billion years to recover at this pace. Is that right? We'll have an intern check, but it could actually be two hundred trillion years.
Manufacturing is down, home prices are at their lowest in years with many foreclosures still waiting in the pipeline, oil prices are quite high, Europe is imploding, auto sales are down, public sector jobs are being cut like the dickens, and all the talk in Washington is about... cutting food stamps and Medicare and whatever else helps people stay alive. Perhaps the conversation should return to "getting people jobs," for money, which can be exchanged for goods and services!
