Even as the Obama White House was busy touting its Friday jobs report, CNBC’s Jeff Cox looked deeper inside the government’s data and discovered that the actual increase of working Americans numbers a paltry 4,000.
Worse, reports Cox, “the jobs that were created skewed heavily toward lower quality. Full-time jobs declined by 150,000, while part-time positions increased by 77,000.”
Adding to the disappointing news, says Cox, is the fact that “there were 110,000 fewer married men at work, while married women saw their ranks shrink by 59,000.”
The Republican National Committee wasted no time demystifying the hype surrounding the Obama jobs numbers.
“We’re still faced with Carter-era levels of labor force participation,” said RNC Chairman Reince Priebus in a statement. “Creating 300,000 jobs in one month shouldn’t be a new high; it should be the minimum we expect.”
Even reliably progressive media outlets including Huffington Post were forced to concede that the jobs report was no cause for celebration. Indeed, wages have grown just 2.1%, a figure only slightly above the 2% rate of inflation. And as Market Watch notes, “seasonal (that is, temporary) hiring probably made the November jobs report look a little better than it really was.”
As CNS News points out, the number of working age Americans in the U.S. labor force remains at a 36-year low. In total, 92,447,000 American are no longer in the labor force.