Bloomberg.com is reporting that the government's revised annual job losses for April 2008 to March 2009 will show that 824,000 more jobs were lost during that time than were originally counted.
Bloomberg.com sensationalizes it by saying, "When the government releases Friday's employment report, nearly a million jobs could be erased," then it quickly acknowledges, "[T]he expected drop will show up in the ... revised job losses ... showing the labor market was in much worse shape than we knew at the time."
I agree, the numbers show that things were worse than believed. But this country already knew it was losing half a million jobs or more every month. That's a crisis. The fact that it is worse than we thought it was at the time should not make it acceptable now, in the eyes of any American, for those in government to have ignored it the way they did.
On average, the revision, while alarming, raised each month's total by less than 70,000. Not too long ago, that was considered a bad month. Recently, it has been treated as a sign that things were getting better.
It's all in the way you look at it, I guess.
But, please, don't forget that those 824,000 jobs were held, at one time, by flesh–and–blood people. I'd like to think most, if not all, will find work, but another Bloomberg.com observation punctures that balloon.
Economic theorists have long believed that job losses caused by a company closing could be offset by jobs created by new or existing businesses. But the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics told Bloomberg.com that most of the revision "appears to be due in part to an increase in the number of business closings."
Sounds to me like those jobs aren't coming back.
And if Obama and the Democrats don't want this to be the dreaded jobless recovery, they'd better find a way to encourage a lot of job creation.
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