The Economic Recovery: A Myth Built Upon A Myth

No matter how much data you point to showing the health of the US economy isn’t as good as advertised, you will inevitably hear the refrain, “But look at the jobs numbers!”

Just the other day, Peter Schiff appeared on Fox Business and said the US economy is likely already in recession. Peter repeated his prediction that the Fed wasn’t going to raise rates again, but would instead drop them to zero. National Alliance Securities Global strategist Andy Brenner was having none of that. He insisted the Fed would raise rates at least two more times this year because the economy is doing OK. And what was his proof? You guessed it – jobs!

Peter made mincemeat out of Brenner’s argument, pointing out that most of the new jobs in the February report were part-time and low paying.

Eighty percent of these jobs are service-sector jobs, many of them are minimum wage jobs. You can’t raise a family on these jobs. Many kids can’t even move out of their parents’ houses because they can’t get a job.”

discourage

But what of the bigger picture? What do we make of the Obama administration’s contention that the economy has added millions of jobs since the last recession? How does this claim stack up to reality?

As it turns out, not very well. Ryan McMaken exposes the fact that all of this boasting about jobs is nothing but myth in a recent article at the Mises Institute.

He starts by citing an appearance by David Stockman on Bloomberg TV:

In the course of the interview…one of the Bloombergcommentators returned to well-worn bullet points and claimed ‘we’ve created, like, millions of jobs’ since the last recession.’ Stockman’s response was ‘no we haven’t’ and he went on to note that ‘if we look at real jobs, at full time jobs, there are no more today than in December [2007].’ Stockman also pointed out that many of those jobs were simply replacing what was lost during the recession. Naturally, Stockman realizes that if you’re going to measure progress in jobs growth, you have to measure from the peak of the previous business cycle, and not from the bottom of the most recent trough.”