February’s jobs report may be the last ray of economic sunshine we see for a while.

The New York Times reports:

The unemployment rate was 7.7 percent, the lowest since December 2008, compared with 7.9 percent in January. Economists had been expecting the economy to add 165,000 jobs in February, with no movement in the rate. After peaking at 10 percent in October 2009, the unemployment rate fell steadily for three years but has been stuck at just below 8 percent since last September.





One of the most overlooked aspects of the recovery is that the slow pace of growth is a feature, not a bug. Without the constant obstructionism of the GOP it wouldn’t have been quite this slow but it was not meant to be a rapid recovery in the first place. Previous recoveries were based on inflating a new economic bubble to replace the one that had burst and led to a recession. This did nothing to solve the underlying problems of a weak manufacturing base, a severe trade imbalance and other factors that inevitably led back to a weak jobs market.

Despite the glacial pace of the current recovery, the economy has continued to do the last thing the GOP wants: pick up steam. This might not be a sign of things to come, however, as the Sequester threatens to derail the recovery (as very much intended by Republicans). The enormous, and unnecessary, budget cuts will cost hundred of thousands of jobs and place millions of government workers on unpaid furlough (full disclosure, my wife will be among that number). The best we can hope for is that the economy is sufficiently self-perpetuating at this point to absorb the blow without reversing its momentum.

Even if the economy goes to grow, the GOP has several more “fiscal crises” lined up to put an end to that. If Republicans do manage to push us back into a recession by pursuing their already proven-to-fail austerity measures, it would be nice if the American people could remember that the economy was in the middle of a solid, if protracted, recovery before the GOP kneecapped it.

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