A jobless recovery continues

Fears of a faltering economic recovery grew when the Labor Department reported last week that hiring had slowed in November and unemployment had increased from 9.6 percent to 9.8 percent. The nation added a total of only 39,000 jobs last month, fewer than most economists had projected. Private employers added 50,000, the fewest since January, while government employment rolls continued to shrink. All told, 15.1 million Americans are officially unemployed; 6.3 million of them have been jobless for at least six months.

Yet other economic indicators showed strength. Pending home sales in October increased 10 percent over September, and retailers have reported stronger-than-expected holiday sales. The problem, said Sal Guatieri, senior economist at BMO Capital Markets, is that “the economy is not growing fast enough to satisfy all the new job seekers.”

“The unemployment rate has long been called Obama’s Katrina,” said Felix Salmon in Reuters.com. But dysfunction in Washington—where Republicans are more interested in securing tax cuts for the wealthy than in helping the unemployed—is making an ugly situation worse. You can read “too much into a single data point,” but these unemployment numbers indicate a massive policy failure.

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I’ll grant you it’s a “mystery,” said Larry Kudlow in National Review Online. Retail sales have risen for four straight months and “manufacturing reports have been solid.” The jobs data “just doesn’t tally with all the other good economic news.” It seems “the economy is actually rising at a roughly 3 percent rate.” If government resists the temptation to intervene, employment is bound to pick up.

How? said Robert Reich in Salon.com. Mired in debt following “years of stagnant wages,” average Americans lack the consumer power to jump-start a stalled economy. Among those without college degrees, “more than 20 percent” are jobless. This is no recovery—it’s a “jobs emergency.”