As President Obama said himself, that was the message in Friday’s Labor Department report, which showed that the United States economy added 151,000 jobs in October.
It was certainly a welcome change after four months of job losses but not strong enough to make a dent in unemployment. Nearly 15 million people are still out of work, and the unemployment rate remains at 9.6 percent.
The jobless rate has not fallen substantially this year largely because job growth has been barely fast enough to absorb new entrants to the labor force. And even if the economy suddenly ramps up and starts adding 208,000 jobs a month — the average during the best year of job creation this decade — it would take 12 years to fully close the gap between the growing number of American workers and the total number of jobs available, according to Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project.
The latest numbers underscore the challenges that lie ahead for Washington in the wake of a newly divided government and calls by Republican leadership to discredit President Obama’s economic policies. Economists themselves cannot agree about what kinds of policy measures would rescue the job market. And even if a magic bullet were available, it seems unlikely that a gridlocked Congress could cooperate long enough to put it in place.
The policy measures that are more feasible — in particular, the Federal Reserve’s decision this week to pump more money into the economy — seem to be upsetting the rest of world. The lead-up to the Group of 20 summit meeting in South Korea next week has been dominated by criticisms of the Fed’s announcement and battle cries over “currency wars.”
Given all this, President Obama has tried to recast his Asia trip as a jobs mission.
“The primary purpose is to take a bunch of U.S. companies and open up markets so that we can sell in Asia, in some of the fastest-growing markets in the world, and we can create jobs here in the United States of America,” Mr. Obama told his cabinet Thursday. On Friday he tried to highlight the bright spots in the jobs report, calling it “encouraging.” Still he acknowledged, “The fact is, an encouraging jobs report doesn’t make a difference if you’re still one of the millions of people who are looking for work.”
He reached out to Republicans who have just won control of the House and picked up six seats in the Senate, pledging to work together on job growth. “I am open to any idea, any proposal, any way we can get the economy growing faster so that people who need work can find it faster,” he said, ticking off ideas like more infrastructure spending and tax breaks for businesses.
(source:nytimes.com)
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