A real bummer, man.
Today is Jobs Day. The last Jobs Day before the presidential election (it’s on Tuesday; you might have heard). So how’re those jobs doing?
The economy added 161,000 jobs last month, with most sectors contributing to this increase. The unemployment rate ticked down to 4.9 percent, just missing many economists’ expectations. Average hourly earnings are up a few percent since the same time last year.
The Hillary Clinton campaign will probably like it – the U.S. economy has been adding a few hundred thousand jobs a month for years now, and she’ll call it progress.
The Donald Trump campaign called the jobs report "disastrous" and Donald Trump himself called it "phony".
The Alliance for American Manufacturing looked at the numbers and noted the United States lost another 9,000 manufacturing jobs.
This puts President Obama’s campaign pledge to create 1 million manufacturing jobs during his second term firmly in the garbage, where, if we’re being honest, it has been for months. That’s an enormous bummer …
… because manufacturing is a remarkable economic engine, but it must be supported or it atrophies. And the more it atrophies, the more likely we are to miss out on the industries of the future.
We’ll faithfully track until this president leaves office. Today, right near the end of President Obama’s time in office, what we affectionately call the AAMeter stands at just 298,000 jobs created since his second term began – and 702,000 away from the president’s 2012 goal. He'll need 234,000 new jobs each month for his last three months in office if he wants to reach his goal.