The Labor Department released July’s employment figures today and once again there is little good news. According to the report the economy added 163,000 jobs last month even though the unemployment rate ratcheted up slightly to 8.3 percent. The number of additional jobs is mediocre by any other name, but the figure is double the jobs added in June and exceeded Wall Street’s doom-and-gloom forecast. This tarnished silver-lining was enough to provide the Obama administration with some spin traction by claiming that the “pace” of job growth is picking up.
Alan B. Krueger, the chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said that Obama’s jobs plan would help those economic sectors that are struggling the most during this jobless recession, namely, public sector employees and construction workers.
“If you look at today’s jobs report, where we saw declines were construction and government education jobs,” said Krueger. “The main components of the Jobs Act would target exactly those two areas, by investing more in infrastructure and helping local governments keep teachers and first responders on the payrolls. I think it’s the kind of medicine that’s well targeted to the continuing areas of weakness in the job market.”
The devil is in the details, of course, and today’s report also provided Republicans with ammunition for their nauseatingly familiar mantra: less government, less regulation, and less taxes means more investment by the private sector. Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, rehearsed the same tired lyrics Republicans have been singing for decades, laying the blame for America’s economic woes at the feet of the man who inherited the mess three years ago.
“This is an extraordinary record of failure. The president’s policies have not worked because he thinks government makes America work. He’s wrong,” Romney bleated.
Never mind that Obama has spent his first term cleaning up the mess left in the wake of Republican economic policy during the two terms that they controlled both the White House and Congress. Never mind the surpluses left by Clinton that Bush squandered. Never mind that the largest expansion of government spending since the New Deal was brought on by two wars and an expansion of Medicare. Never mind that the Republicans irrational fear of taxes has a created a climate in which it is impossible to govern because revenues are hamstrung by unaffordable tax cuts they want to keep extending into infinity. No, never mind the facts.
Admittedly, Obama’s economic policy has been less than admirable. Under Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, many of the same Wall Street-favoring features of the Bush years have continued: bail outs for irresponsible (indeed, criminal) investment banks, failure to regulate volatile markets like derivatives where trading smoke-and-mirrors continues with no accountability, failure to regulate investment bank shenanigans, and an ineffective response to Republican rhetorical nonsense on taxes.
Nevertheless, it is doubtful that an economy as large and complex (and corrupt!) as America’s can be turned around on a dime, let alone a single term, so Romney’s exhortations ring as hollow as the Republican economic fantasy that markets can do everything if we just leave powerful private actors to do as they please.