More jobs misery

Only 18,000 jobs were created last month, the Department of Labor reported, sparking new concerns that the feeble U.S. recovery has ground to a dead stop. The number was far below the 125,000 new jobs needed to keep pace with population growth. Unemployment rose to 9.2 percent, and almost half of the 14 million jobless have now sought work for six months or longer.

President Obama said the anemic hiring proved that the recovery from the Great Recession had “a long way to go.” But he said that Congress could spur job creation “right now” by passing measures he’s recommended, including patent reform and the creation of a new infrastructure bank. Republican House Speaker John Boehner blamed Obama, saying that his “stimulus spending binge” and new federal regulations were wrecking the economy.

Boehner is right to pin this “indescribably grim jobs report” on Obama’s love of red tape, said Irwin Stelzer in The Weekly Standard. His administration has blocked oil drilling, costing 100,000 jobs. He’s banned companies from using unpaid interns, denying teens the chance to gain vital work experience. “Then there is Obamacare,” which discourages small businesses from hiring out of fear that they’ll be hit with huge health-care bills. The good news? Those policies can be reversed when Obama is booted from office.

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It’s bizarre to hear “Republicans condemning the crisis that they helped to create and are refusing to fix,” said The New York Times in an editorial. Cutbacks in state and local spending have caused about 1 million public-sector layoffs over the past two years. Those losses could have been avoided if the GOP had given up its “ideological goal of cutting spending” when we needed it most.

We’re in for years of high unemployment, and we’d better get used to it, said Peter Orszag in Bloomberg.com. “Recoveries following financial collapses tend to be frailer” than those associated with normal cyclical downturns; some countries in similar straits have experienced unemployment rates five points above normal for a decade. Our best hope now is to “be as bold as we can” in boosting hiring and cutting the deficit. But we have to steel ourselves to the prospect that we’re in for a real “hard slog.”