The jobless rate fell in September to 7.8% from 8.1%, though the economy created only 114,000 new jobs, and some of our conservative friends smell a bureaucratic rat so close to Election Day. We doubt the Labor gnomes are manipulating the numbers, and in any case chasing conspiracies detracts from the real news, which is that the job market still stinks.
Democrats are celebrating the decline in the jobless rate, which only shows how their standards have changed since President Obama entered the White House.
In 2004, they were lambasting George W. Bush for a September jobless rate that was 5.4%.
Only last month they were begging the Federal Reserve to print more money indefinitely because the job market was so weak. Now they say happy days are almost here again.
Editorial board member Steve Moore on the good and bad of the jobs report and whether it will help President Obama's campaign.
The reality is that more than three years into this weakest of economic recoveries, 12.1 million Americans are still out of work—nearly 23 million by the broader definition that includes those who have stopped looking or can't find full time work—and the labor participation rate is still down to 1981 levels at 63.6%. Hooray!
Of the 114,000 new jobs, 104,000 were in the private economy, and all of the 86,000 in upward revisions for July and August came in government jobs.
Job growth for 2012 has averaged 146,000 a month, which is down from 153,000 in 2011.
Manufacturing employment fell again (down 38,000 in the last two months) further dampening one of the few bright spots in this recovery.
A still abysmal 40.1% of the unemployed in America have been jobless for six months or more. Such a job market is anemic by any historic measure for this stage in an expansion and reflects continuing slow GDP growth in the 1%-2% range.
The number that has our friends suspicious is the giant 873,000 leap in employment as measured by the "household survey." That's the biggest one-month increase in nearly 30 years, which certainly does deserve an explanation.
The household survey contacts about 60,000 individual households to find out how many Americans are working. It is different from the much larger "establishment survey," which measures about 141,000 businesses and government agencies to see how many jobs they created. The household survey determines the jobless rate, so the huge one-month leap accounts for the September decline to 7.8%.
Because of its small size, the household survey tends to be highly volatile. In August it found that the number of net new jobs had fallen by 119,000 and in July by 195,000. The point is that you can't read too much into one month's number. As much as we agree that you can't trust the government, this is probably the explanation for the huge one-month jump in September.
Even if the 873,000 job estimate is confirmed in future months, the survey found that 582,000 of those jobs were what the survey calls "part-time for economic reasons."
That is, they would rather be working full-time. The number of part-time workers for economic reasons grew to 8.6 million in September from 7.7 million in March.
Working part time is certainly preferable to not working at all, but it's tough to pay the mortgage, energy, medical and grocery bills with a 20-hour-a-week job. The job market has been bad for so long that people are settling for any paycheck they can get. One suspect in this shift to part-time work is the cost of providing health insurance, especially with ObamaCare looming.
Campaigning on Friday, Mr. Obama touted the latest jobs report and repeated his refrain that the economy has created five million jobs during this recovery.
What he didn't say is that in a normal recovery we would have nearly twice that number, and that the economy is still about 4.5 million jobs short of where it was in 2007.
He also didn't mention that those jobs aren't paying all that well because real median household income is down $3,040 since the recession ended in June 2009. That's right, the economy is growing but real incomes are still falling.
Mr. Obama claims to be a tribune of the middle class, but he's presided over the worst economy for average workers since Jimmy Carter.
Mr. Obama is promising four more years of the same policies he's pursued in his first term, except that this time he says he really will raise taxes immediately in 2013. Anyone who wants the same job creation should vote for him.
A version of this article appeared October 6, 2012, on page A12 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Happy Days Are Not Here Again.
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