Jobs Report Is Disappointing But Not Disastrous

Not so very long ago, I was talking with someone who is, as they say, close to the White House. It’s so frustrating, he told me: we keep getting these periods when the economy seems to be picking up, and job growth is accelerating; then, wham, we get another disappointing employment report, and it’s back to where we were.

Well, the White House just took another one on the chin—two, actually. The latest payroll report by the Labor Department showed that the economy created just a hundred thirteen thousand jobs in January, and seventy-five thousand in December. That’s not even half the rate of job growth we saw for 2013 as a whole. Taken at face value, it suggests that the economic recovery, far from strengthening—which is what I and many other analysts have been suggesting—is actually sputtering.

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