The Frozen Present

Call it beanie-weenie full employment:

"Official" funemployment remains steady at 9.6%; REAL funemployment (U5) also remains steady at 11.0%. The noteworthy kicker this month is underemployment (U6), which jumped four tenths of a percent to 17.1%, the highest level in a year.

Takeaways:

***Gotta love Geoff's phrasery: "We lost 95K non-farm jobs, but they claim that we added 64K private sector jobs. That doesn't agree well with ADP's announcement that we lost 39,000 jobs last month."

***To which Ensign Ed provides the pithy corallary: "Yesterday, Gallup warned that serious job losses occurred in the final two weeks of the month, and that the BLS data would likely miss it in this report. If true (ADP also saw private-sector losses [my link inserted]), then next month’s report will look significantly worse."

Or, in other words, good news for the Donks in that that calamity will land AFTER the election. "Good news" in the sense of losing sixty House seats instead of, say, eighty.

***This is the longest sustained period of +9.5% unemployment since....the Great Depression. AKA the good ol' days for which Red Barry pines so yearningly.

Speaking of which, the following is irrelevant boilerplate now, but expect it to start having some bite next year (via J-Ger):

When we arrived in Washington, the Republicans in Congress, they had a different idea. They knew it would take more than a couple of years to climb out of this unbelievable recession that they had created. They knew that by the time the midterm rolled around that people would still be out of work; that people would still be frustrated. And they figured that if we just sat on the sidelines and opposed every idea, every compromise that I offered, if they spent all their time attacking Democrats instead of attacking problems, that somehow they would prosper at the polls. So they spent the last twenty months saying no -– even to policies that they’d supported in the past. No to middle class tax cuts. No to help for small businesses. No to a bipartisan deficit reduction commission that they had once sponsored. I said yes; they said no. I’m pretty sure if I said the sky was blue, they’d say no. (Laughter.) If I said there are fish in the sea, they’d say no. See, their calculation was if Obama fails, then we win.

AUDIENCE: Booo!

THE PRESIDENT: That was their calculation. Well, they might have thought that playing political games would get them through an election, but I knew it wasn’t going to get America through our crisis. So I made a different choice. Instead of playing politics, I took whatever steps were necessary to stop an economic freefall –- (applause.) I did what we needed to do even if it wasn’t popular, even if it wasn’t easy. Because you all did not elect me to do what was easy. You didn’t elect me to spend all day looking at the polls and figuring out how to keep me in office. You elected me to do what was right. That’s why you elected me, to do what’s right. (Applause.) And twenty months later, twenty months later, we no longer face the possibility of a second depression. Our economy is growing again.

Oh, he'll have to adjust the time frame - it makes no sense to whiningly claim NOW that "recovery was always going to take a long time" when everybody knows (because he wouldn't let anybody forget) that he claimed Hogzilla I would "fix" the economy, and therefore had to be rammed through, IMMEDIATELY (see the chart - it's why he "hard-pivoted" to health care). It's also pointless to whine about anything Republicans have done over the past two years because they haven't had the numbers to wipe Barry's ass, much less gum up the legislative process.

But that problem is about to be crushingly rectified. And you know how irrationally fond independents are of comity and bipartisanship and "putting aside differences to work together for the common good". Conservatives are trying to rescue the country from Obamunism and push it all the way back to constitutionalism (for the common good); indies are putting the Dems in "time out" for a couple of years until they learn to "play with the other kids" better. And when The One updates his whine to blame the "Boehner/McConnell Axis" or whatever for his Obamaconomy, that irrelevant boilerplate will all of a sudden have a great deal of relevance, and B.O.'s re-election effort will be alive and well.

Only, that is, if the Lame Duck session extends some portion of the Bush tax rates, and doesn't ram down a VAT or any other calamity that triggers that depression he's so fond of thinking his fiscal sinkhole averted, and indellibly tars him with the accompanying responsibility. Two years won't be nearly enough time to outrun that little dollop of political suicide.