Despite the Christmas season hirings, December loses 85,000 jobs, unemployment rate stays at 10%

obama-failRemember, the recession is over. At least that’s what Obama lovers want you to believe. Just look at November’s unemployment numbers drop! Ooops, wait a minute, back to reality. Even with the Christmas season in which employers hire more people than usual to help with the holiday “rush”, Fox News reports that employers still shed a more-than-expected 85,000 jobs in December as hundreds of thousands of people stopped looking for work altogether, reversing the slight gains from the month before. Despite the losses, the unemployment rate held at 10 percent. By fudging the numbers a little bit, the rate would have been higher if more people had been looking for work instead of leaving the labor force because they can’t find jobs. So basically this report just does not include the underemployed (people working part time who want a full time job, or just quit looking for a job) which puts the REAL unemployment rate at around 17.4%. Even the AP was forced to report the obvious and stop its Obama slurping for at least story.

The White House said the numbers nevertheless demonstrate that the rate at which jobs are disappearing has slowed, given that employment fell by 139,000 in September and 127,000 in October. Christina Romer, chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, wrote on the White House blog that the recovery will “not be a straight line.” But she said 10-percent unemployment is unacceptable.

“The unemployment rate remains unacceptably high, which underscores the need for responsible actions to jump-start private-sector job creation,” she wrote. “It is essential that we continue our efforts to move in the right direction and replace job losses with robust job gains.”

President Obama plans to announce Friday steps he’s taking to combat unemployment, including using $2.3 billion in tax credits from the $787 billion economic stimulus package toward the goal of creating tens of thousands of green jobs. Obama also was expected to call upon Congress for an additional $5 billion in spending for clean energy manufacturing, an idea first proposed by Vice President Joe Biden last month.

“We are in a very tough economic environment,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said.

Republicans said the persistently high unemployment is a sign that the economic stimulus package has not delivered and that the administration should not pursue a second package in the same vein. They said Obama needs to focus more on the economy in the year ahead.

“Instead of wildly pivoting from one issue to the next, the Obama administration needs to listen to American families asking ‘where are the jobs?’ and employers calling on Washington to scrap these policies that are already costing jobs, starting with a government takeover of health care,” House Minority Leader John Boehner said in a written statement.

The sharp drop in the work force — 661,000 fewer people — showed that more of the jobless are giving up on their search for work. Once people stop looking for jobs, they are no longer counted among the unemployed.

When discouraged workers and part-time workers who would prefer full-time jobs are included, the so-called “underemployment” rate in December rose to 17.3 percent, from 17.2 percent in October. That’s just below a revised figure of 17.4 percent in October, the highest on records dating from 1994.

Revisions to the previous two months’ data showed the economy actually generated 4,000 jobs in November, the first gain in nearly two years. But the revisions showed it also lost 16,000 more jobs than previously estimated in October.

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January 8, 2010 · Filed Under General Politics


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