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Edited on Thu Jan-26-06 04:52 PM by Armstead
This came via Bernie Sanders website.
From Manufacturing and Technology News
The Economic State of the Union by Charles W. McMillion
The December jobs report confirms that since the bursting of the 1990s financial bubble the United States has faced the slowest job creation on records going back to 1939.
Indeed, because jobs lost paid for more hours worked per week than did the newly created jobs, the country ended 2005 with fewer private-sector hours worked than it had in January 2001. This five-year loss of private sector hours worked is the first on record for the private sector and the worst recorded for the entire labor force. Reduced hours worked also explains why measured productivity growth is stronger than average even with output growth far weaker than normal. Productivity is a measure of output per hours worked.
Private firms added only 958,000 jobs over the past five years while state and local governments added 1.1 million jobs (schools, health care, prisons) and the federal government reduced (postal) jobs, for total growth of only two million jobs for the entire U.S. economy. For the first five-year period on record, the private sector has lost supervisory/managerial jobs. And as everyone worries about runaway health care costs, health care providers accounted for 1.4 million new private sector jobs in the past five years.
Excluding health care, the private sector has lost 467,000 jobs since January 2001. And this includes 894,000 new jobs in bars and restaurants......
Where is the economy headed? The most worrying indicator is that policy makers do not seem to understand just where the economy is right now.
— Charles W. McMillion, president and chief economist of MBG Information Services, is a past professor and associate director in the Johns Hopkins University policy institute.
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