April 29, 2011
The calls for the bankruptcy of the Washington Post (a.k.a. Fox on 15th Street) are getting louder. The post told readers that:
“The job market was a bright spot in the first quarter … with the unemployment rate falling and job growth coming in strong.”
The economy added an average of 159,000 jobs a month in the first quarter. At this pace it will take more than 14 years to get back to normal levels of unemployment. By comparison, in the year following the end of 1981-82 recession the economy created almost 290,000 jobs. Adjusting for the growth in the labor force, this would be a pace of more than 450,000 jobs a month now.
In the four years from 1996 to 2000, when we had already fully recovered from the prior recession, the economy generated 250,000 jobs a month. It is not clear what criterion the Post is using in describing the job growth in the first quarter as “strong.”
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