Cheap Shot: The NYT and Jobs

Reprinted by permission of Ray Abernathy.  Ray's website is available at: http://www.rayabernathy.com

Cheap Shot: The NYT and JobsRay Abernathy

Last week, the Washington Post’s Neil Irwin got the disastrous jobs report three-quarters right, but Peter S. Goodman and Michael M. Grynbaum of the New York Times got it wrong, wrong, wrong again.

In his front page NYT piece, Irwin almost properly characterized the December jobs report:  “Employers created a paltry 18,000 net jobs. Economists had forecast four times as many new positions, and it takes about 125,000 a month just to keep up with population growth.”  But what he should have written was “growth in the workforce,” and that the real net growth for December therefore was -107,000 jobs.

Goodman and Grynbaum at the Post failed to mention either the 125,000 it takes to keep up with growth in the workforce, or the net LOSS of 107,000 jobs.  Later in their article, they do mention that, according to the Labor Department, the Bush jobs-destruction machine averaged only 122,000 new jobs per month last year.  Did that include December?  Do the math: that means we had a net loss of at least 36,000 jobs for the year, maybe as high as 143,000. No wonder the unemployment rate shot up to 5 percent.    

 

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