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Playing with the unemployment numbers
Job seekers pick up open job fliers from potential employers at at a career fair in Los Angeles, Calif.
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Kai Ryssdal: Politicians spent their morning trying their best to find a silver lining in the jobs numbers. Not in an all-that-constructive way, though.
Leaders from both sides of the aisle want to use it to support their case in the debt ceiling debate. Marketplace's Nancy Marshall Genzer reports they're having varying degrees of success.
Nancy Marshall Genzer: The White House insists it's above stirring the jobs numbers into the messy debate on the debt ceiling. Here's White House economist Austan Goolsbee earlier today on the Marketplace Morning Report.
Austan Goolsbee: We shouldn't be using data as a leverage point for negotiations.
But then President Obama did just that, saying the numbers demand an immediate deal to get the economy rolling again and get Americans to work.
Barack Obama: Now the American people sent us here to do the right thing, not for party, but for country. So we're going to work together to get things done on their behalf.
The president used the phrase "right now" 10 times during his speech.
Larry Sabato teaches political science at the University of Virginia. He says the urgency is meant to scare negotiators into action.
Larry Sabato: You want to create a sense of crisis. You have to do that to get anything done in Washington.
Sabato says Democrats are also using the jobs numbers to argue against spending cuts. Republicans say the numbers strengthen their stance against taxes. Just listen to House Speaker John Boehner.
John Boehner: Tax hikes on families and job creators will only make things worse.
Boehner and other Republicans say more taxes would make it harder for employers to hire.
Steve East is chief economist at Height Analytics, which monitors Washington for Wall Street. He says Republicans' jabs on jobs pack a lot of punch.
Steve East: The Republicans can use this bad jobs report to score political points better than the Democrats can because the bad jobs report happened under the watch of a Democratic administration.
East says rightly or wrongly, the president will be blamed for today's dismal numbers -- and that weakens his hand.
In Washington, I'm Nancy Marshall Genzer for Marketplace.
The best line in this so-called debate is: "We don't want to raise taxes on job creators." The term "job creator" would necessarily assume that the person or entity with that title actually creates jobs. Yet, who actually has been creating jobs for the last 2.5 years? Have the top 2% income earning individuals actually created more jobs for our economy? Though, 9.2% unemployment seems to say a resounding "no", or at least "not nearly enough". Therefore, if this is the case, logic would lead us to conclude that tax breaks for the job creators is having no effect, and therefore tax hikes won't have any effect either.
Which *party* holds the White House isn't directly relevant. What we should try to correlate unemployment figures with is what sort of *policies* the government has been following. And the policy of this administration and of the Democrats that ruled Congress for the last six years has been that the solution to any problem, political or economic, is to throw money at it. These unemployment numbers lead inevitably to the conclusion that throwing money at our problems isn't working. The debt ceiling has not yet been raised because some Republicans realize that they money we've been throwing at our problems was money we didn't have to begin with.
Good point, Kathryn. The number of politicians evading the reasons for poor job growth would be astounding if it weren't so familiar. John Boehner says raising taxes "on families and job creators" kills jobs. Other Republicans submit that government spending sap jobs, period. It's all so much drivel.
Mr. Boehner, can you show us which corporations have arrested growth because their taxes are too high? Many of the largest ones pay next to no federal taxes anyway, thanks to off-shoring facilites and maintaining false fronts in tax haven countries.
President Obama should say to the GOP, "Listen, you can blame me for poor job growth, but its corporations who make hiring decisions, and its often corporations who ask the government for incentives to create jobs. Well, we've had a stimulus, a bank bail-out and lots of tax expenditures. Tell me again how is it my fault that corporate profits are surging back while so many Americans continue to be out of work?"
Marketplace needs to answer questions like these by reporting and breaking down facts, not just quoting the usual rhetoric.
I heard someone say (paraphrasing)....President Obama will be blamed--rightly or wrongly--for the jobs numbers.
Which is it...right or wrong? OK, it's good to know which way the winds of public opinion are blowing, but I also look to Marketplace to provide the information about what IS, not just what people think. Is Obama to blame for the current employment situation? If not, why not say so. If so, why not say so? If it's more complicated (which it is), it might make an interesting segment.
