Weigel

No New Jobs in August

Well, this is bad.

Nonfarm payroll employment was unchanged (0) in August, and the unemployment  rate held at 9.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

Zero! What happened? Actually, it was a bit of a fluke: “About 45,000 workers in the telecommunications industry were on strike and thus off company payrolls during the survey reference period.” But if that hadn’t happened, it stlll would have represented the weakest growth in more than a year. Manufacturing jobs declined slightly (minus 3,000), as they’ve been declining all year. Government payrolls keep shrinking, which is the only intentional part of this.

Eric Cantor’s office responds with some boilerplate and an idea:

We would agree with President Obama’s suggestion earlier this week to give states more control over infrastructure projects and eliminate wasteful spending through reforms to current law, which will boost economic growth without increasing spending. For example, eliminating the requirement that states must set aside 10 percent of federal surface transportation funds for transportation museums, education, and preservation would allow states to devote these monies to high-priority infrastructure projects, without adding to the deficit.

But I fully expect Democrats to remind people of that uncertainty-tastic debt ceiling fight we had right before August started.