Prometheus 6

It turns out that there's much less to new job creation than meets the eye:

"In his reflections, offered at his post-election press conference, the president singled out the bright job picture, echoing the sentiments he expressed on release of the October employment data a couple of Fridays ago. And, to be fair, he didn't lack for company. Chorusing Mr. Bush's upbeat view of the report were the usual suspect Wall Street cheerleaders, who couldn't wait to pick up their megaphones and hail the big upward revisions of the previous two months' employment data, and the drop in last month's jobless rate.

Except to confuse civilians, journalists and kindred innocents, we were and remain a little mystified as to what all the hoorahing was about. While there was a sprinkling of glad tidings, notably the modestly longer workweek in September and October, and a nice 0.4% rise in hourly wages, the report struck us as pretty lame. Worse than that, actually, because of what it seemed to portend for both jobs and the economy.

The consensus -- which has become a synonym for wrong guessers -- was looking for upwards of 120,000 additions to the nation's nonfarm payrolls. Instead, the gain was a considerably more subdued 92,000. And as those trusty stewards of the excellent Liscio Report, Philippa Dunne and Doug Henwood, noted in their astute dissection of the numbers, the supposedly large revisions to previous months were not especially outsized, but pretty much in line with similar revisions effected over the past 45 years.

Somewhat ominous, too, was the fact that the improvement, far from widespread or even decently pervasive, was quite spotty -- and those spots were either not terribly encouraging as indicators of future employment trends, or a mite suspect.

For example, in this survey, which was more or less critical because it happened to take place immediately in advance of the elections, a full 39,000, or 42% of the total gain, came courtesy of local governments, mostly back-to-school hires. Another 27,000 of the additions were in bars and restaurants and 23,000 were in health care.

In contrast, manufacturing shed 39,000 jobs in October and construction employment declined 26,000, weighed down by a hefty 31,000 shrinkage in payrolls connected to residential construction. The drop in homebuilding employment, Philippa and Doug point out, was conspicuous among the workers who finish houses, likely a preview of things to come.

But the larger point of all these numerical details -- and we apologize if you're feeling a trifle numbed by numbers -- is that the bulk of jobs being added are not big payers, and the bulk of the jobs being lost are."   (emphasis added)

And that, in a nutshell, is the source of GOP woes. Sure, Iraq has become an ever larger morass, and voters know it. And we cannot overlook the high percentage of exit polls commentary regarding corruption.

But if the economy was throwing off more benfits to the folks below the top 10% of earners/asset holders, the election would not have been nearly so lopsided.