The Economic Policy Institute is one of those Washington think tanks that is often described as left-leaning because its mostly funded by labor organizations. But EPI economist Heidi Shierholz surely demonstrated no sympathy for President Obama when she commented on the latest jobs report this morning.
Here’s what she said:
“The unemployment rate is, for the moment, holding steady at 9.1 percent, but at the current rate of job creation, the unemployment rate will soon begin to rise again. We are mired in high unemployment with miserably low job growth. This country has fourteen million unemployed people, and the job growth rate has unmistakably slowed down since the spring.
“This morning’s data release shows that 103,000 jobs were added in September. That number, however, includes around 45,000 Verizon workers coming off the picket lines, so the net new jobs the economy created in September was actually around 58,000.
“This level of growth is in line with the dismal average of the last four months, which was 64,000, and that was a slowdown from the not-doing-much-more-than-keeping-up-with-population-growth average of 123,000 of the prior 14 months.”
