While many will be giddy because the BLS reported that job creation came in at 248,000, well above analysts expectations-- and because unemployment ticked down to 5.9 percent-- make no mistake: this is still a bad job market.
That’s because another 315,000 people left the labor force last month. When adding in the numbers of people who entered the civilian population (217,000) job creation is hardly keeping up with population growth.
The job gains, in fact, are not much better than in previous years. When one accounts for part-time work, discouraged workers and those who have dropped out of the labor force entirely, unemployment is closer to 23 percent, with no great sign of retreat from that number.
Six years into the so-called "recovery", the economy should be humming by now.
Instead any vibrations are merely echoes created by the government drumbeat that the economy is just fine.
True, there is plenty of money-- money created by the government via government-sponsored enterprises. And if the government is somehow unhappy with who has money today and who does not—as they seem to be-- they only have themselves to blame.
Some of us have said all along that the best way to get people who need money --actual cash in hand-- is via a paycheck. You can only do that when you encourage job growth. The best way to encourage job growth is to make it easier to hire people, not harder.
But you know our silly government, always doing it the weird way.
Instead they've created tons of cash, along with tons of regulation in hope of creating an economy as they want it to be, not an economy as it is.
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These regulations say precisely how homeowners, home builders, doctors, patients, insurance companies, automakers, factories, students, public utilities, private investors, public companies, universities, airlines, cable companies, software companies, cellphone makers and even bakeries and dairy farmers can spend their own money.
That’s why despite record amounts of money supply, we have the slowest velocity of money ever on record. If monetary velocity were recorded like global temperatures are pretended to be, we’d be in a deep, deep Ice Age.
So along the way this government has created a class of people, like me, who’d like to tell some politicians what precisely THEY could do with their government.
Consequently, today we have both a capital strike AND a labor strike in response to a government that seems to care little for either. But if results are the true measure of intent, then one has to say that government just barely cares more for capital than they do labor.
After all, banks, as Willie Sutton said, are “where the money is.”
Today’s bank robbers are a bit subtler than Sutton. They only wave guns around when they have to. Instead they use the power of the grand jury, the power to prosecute both criminally and civilly any deviation from the approved list of activities that you can do with the money that the government created.
Unemployment benefits, disability benefits and welfare benefits are all on the list of approved financial activities one can participate in with the government’s money.
Creating jobs is too, kind of.
But job creation comes with so many caveats, prerequisites and conditions that, screw it, it’s just easier to stay at home and watch TV.
After all, someone can just hire a kiosk to do our jobs while we all collect our benefits. And if the benefit is not enough, the government can create more money and increase our benefits.
So, yes: The job market is so much better now that 315,000 people have given up looking for work.
Celebrate it; embrace it.
Marx thought the drudgery of work would eventually alienate labor.
But Obama’s figured out a way to avoid labor entirely.
The alienation he throws in for free.
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