I hate to put a damper on the stock party we are all having but I have done a little reflecting on the jobs numbers and I am not very pleased with what I see.
While jobs came in at a very disappointing 108,000 this month, they revised last month’s job gains up by 90,000. While that may sound pretty good it also has to make you think that the entire gain they are claiming for this month may be wiped out by the margin of error they obviously had over the past 30 days.
Another downer is that 11% of the job gains this year have been restaurant and bar jobs, not the highest paying and also a very tenuous form of employment in a bad economy. Health care accounted for another 10% and those are not the best paying jobs either.
With health care you have to imagine that for every one person they hire, there must be another 10 people who are sick enough to need health care workers taking care of them so I read 21,000 health care providers hired last month as being 210,000 additional people who will be producing less next month.
Maybe these same people are moving off the unemployment rolls and into that twilight zone classification of people who are no longer in the labor force. If that’s the case, then 4.9% unemployment may not be a good thing at all!
On a yearly basis, wages and employment are still lower than inflation so the average American is falling behind, no matter how the White House tries to spin it…
