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The jobs numbers look good, but I tend to pay more attention to job growth rather than unemployment. I do this for two reasons. The unemployment number can be artificially low when people leave the workforce, and also it will jump as the economy rebounds and more people are active in their job search.

In the chart above from the Federal Reserve in St. Louis, you can see that President Obama’s private sector job growth has been progressing. That “U” shape is the shape of a private sector recovery. Look at the exact time period the private sector turned the corner. It was the first quarter of 2010, about 6 months after the stimulus took effect.

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After each monthly jobs report I like to highlight two specific industries, healthcare and manufacturing. The healthcare industry in the month of January added over 30,000 jobs. I keep an eye on this, because this is the industry that is directly regulated by ObamaCare and the GOP keeps repeating that Obamacare is a job killer.

NEWSFLASH…if Obamacare is going to kill jobs, shouldn’t the first industry it kills be the industry it DIRECTLY regulates? Of course it should, but it doesn’t.

The second area I want to focus on is manufacturing. This industry did exceptionally well in January. Manufacturing added 50,000 jobs in the last month. That is a pretty healthy clip.

While the total number was 243K jobs created in January, the private sector ALONE added 257,000. The number that everyone is reporting adds into the equation, 14,000 layoffs in the public sector so it reduced the overall number.

Over the last 6 months unemployment has DECLINED at the fastest pace since 1984, when Ronald Reagan was president. If this keeps up and the Republicans do not try halt economic growth through austerity measures, President Obama will win by a landslide in November.