Economists were approaching the new Labor Department report with cautious optimism, with expectations ranging up to nearly 150,000 new jobs added and a minor drop in unemployment.
Whoops.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that only 18,000 net jobs were added and the unemployment rate actually ticked up slightly to 9.2%. Additionally, jobs numbers for April and June were revised downward, taking away about 44,000 jobs.
This dismal report may shine a light on debt negotiations. It puts an even finer point on Democrats claiming that we need higher taxes, both on corporations and individuals. Even by conventional Keynesian economics, that's a terrible idea. Keynes himself would push for tax cuts during a recession. But Democrats can't even keep their liberal economics consistent - they don't care about economics, they care about class warfare and soak-the-rich policies, no matter how the economy is going.
Guy's earlier report on Democrats pushing for more stimulus in light of a continually-sluggish economy is looking more and more prescient.
Average hourly wages for employed workers dropped very slightly, which is terrible news for an economy attempting to make its way out of a long recession. Total government jobs fell by 39,0000. A broader measure of unemployment, the U-6 unemployment rate, rose to 16.2% from 15.8% last month. You can see the fluctuations in the unemployment rate in the BLS table that leads the report:
Here's what the BLS report had to say [pdf]:
The number of unemployed persons (14.1 million) and the unemployment rate (9.2 percent) were essentially unchanged over the month. Since March, the number of unemployed persons has increased by 545,000, and the unemployment rate has risen by 0.4 percentage point.The number of persons unemployed for less than 5 weeks increased by 412,000 in June. The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) was essentially unchanged over the month, at 6.3 million, and accounted for 44.4 percent of the unemployed.
The civilian labor force participation rate was little changed in June at 64.1 percent. The employment-population ratio decreased by 0.2 percentage point to 58.2 percent.
The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) was essentially unchanged in June at 8.6 million. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.
In June, 2.7 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, about the same as a year earlier. (These data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.
Among the marginally attached, there were 982,000 discouraged workers in June, down by 225,000 from a year earlier. (These data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.7 million persons marginally attached to the labor force in June had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities.
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