The Bureau of Labor Statistics released September’s employment figures
on Friday and it was almost entirely good news. The economy added
248,000 new jobs during the month and the unemployment rate dropped to
5.9%. This is the lowest level the jobless rate has been since July 2008
and reiterates that President Obama has helped to resuscitate a
moribund economy that was suffering through a horrific financial crisis
when he took over. The BLS also revised jobs numbers upwards for the
months of August and July, revealing that we actually added 61,000 more
jobs than previously estimated during those two months.
The country is essentially at full employment now. Economists state that for a nation to be at full, healthy employment, the unemployment rate needs to be between 5.5% and 6.0%.
These numbers helpfully point out that the country is indeed better off
than it was when Barack Obama was first sworn in. When Obama took
office in January 2009, the country was in the grips of the worst
financial crisis since the Great Depression. That month, the
unemployment rate stood at 7.8% and climbing. The next month, it rose to
8.3% and kept rising until it hit a peak of 10.0% in October 2009.
However, President Obama’s stimulus package, along with other
initiatives, helped create jobs and reverse the trend.
In 2014 alone, the unemployment rate has dropped by 1.3 percentage points and 1.9 million jobs have been added. Therefore, whenever you hear someone like Ted Cruz (r-TX) claim
that “Obamacare is the biggest job killer in this country,” as he has
done numerous times, you know he is completely full of it. Seriously,
since the full implementation of the law last year, the country has
added well over 2 million jobs. If a law is a ‘job killer,’ shouldn’t it
actually be killing jobs?
The labor force participation rate remained mostly
unchanged at 62.7%. While wingnuts will claim that this number
shows that there are a lot of people that are discouraged and just
giving up on finding work, the majority of this is attributed to baby
boomers retiring, students either going to school or remaining in school
for post-graduate programs and two-parent households where one partner
decides to stay at home to raise children. Is there a large number of
long-term unemployed that need assistance? Certainly. Of course, you
don’t see repugicans doing anything about providing additional
unemployment insurance to these people.
Where improvement needs to be seen is in the median
wage. Wages remained stagnant in September, as the median wage actually
dropped one cent, down to $24.53 an hour. Now, raising the minimum wage,
even modestly, would do quite a bit to push this number up and provide
additional income to working class people. Once again, while this is an
easy solution, repugcans have stood firm and refused to do anything
about it. Therefore, we are stuck with a minimum wage that is not in
line with today’s economic needs.
Still, these numbers do reflect that President Obama
has made things better for Americans since first taking office.
However, you wouldn’t know it based on all of the doom-and-gloom
naysayers, many from his own party, that make it seem that Obama is set
out to destroy America and its economy. The man inherited a total mess,
and while there are still improvements that need to be made, and income
inequality is a real issue in this country, this nation is exponentially
better off than it was when the shrub vacated the White House.
Democrats need to embrace the President and what he’s done for this
nation during the midterms this year, instead of falling over themselves
trying to create a distance between them and Obama.
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