While the economy faces many nagging challenges, the federal government’s report Friday of higher-than-expected job growth since the beginning of the year is clearly good news.
Some 290,000 new jobs were added to payrolls in April, the Labor Department reported — a spike that experts hadn’t seen coming.
Further, the department revised its estimates for prior months and found more good news. Turns out that in March, 230,000 jobs had been added, instead of the estimated 162,000. And February’s estimated loss of 14,000 jobs has been revised to show a gain of 39,000 new jobs.
Add in January’s 14,000 new jobs and the increase hums along at 573,000 for the period.
And though unemployment also rose in April, from 9.7 percent to 9.9 percent, economists told The New York Times that figure is actually a disguised blessing. Unemployment rose because of jobless men and women who had re-entered the search for work, a sign of greater optimism in the workforce. (Labor doesn’t count those who aren’t on the hunt, meaning the actual unemployment rate is even higher than reported.)
Yes, the economy is nowhere near fully recovered from the devastation wrought by the recession. Nearly 10 percent unemployment is unacceptably high. But the Labor Department report suggests the country is regaining its financial footing.
And though U.S. stock exchanges were rattled Thursday with a record 1,000-point drop in minutes, it largely recovered by the closing bell. The problem appears to have been a complex automated reaction to a mistaken trade and concerns about the crisis in Greece. Meanwhile, financial experts from both ends of the political spectrum downplayed the risk that Greece’s European and International Monetary Fund bailout would spread to U.S. markets.
The country represents about 2 percent of the European Union’s economy, and its creditors are largely limited to German and French banks. Another plus: U.S. banks are in a much stronger position presently to deal with any aftershocks.
We hope the Labor Department’s report is a harbinger of better times, and that Congress and the Obama administration see in it the political cover they need to turn toward addressing out-of-control spending. A recovery of the marketplace alone is far from what is needed to control the wild pace of the federal government’s deficit spending — or even touch the staggering national debt.
President Obama’s newly formed National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform began its first round of deliberations this week. The bipartisan panel is charged with providing suggestions to rein in spending, increase revenue and restructure vast entitlement programs like Medicare.
We hope that with the stronger reports on jobs, Washington can switch tracks from bailouts and talk of creating jobs to disciplined spending and measured plans to deal with our future unfunded obligations.
