Austerity - All The Cool Kids Are Doing It

Looks like we need to give the confidence fairy just a little bit longer to do her magic:

For the second month in a row, employers added barely any jobs in June, showing that the economic recovery has hit a serious speed bump.

With all levels of government laying off workers, the Labor Department reported that employers eked out just 18,000 new nonfarm payroll jobs in June. The already low number created in May was also revised downward to a dismally small 25,000 new jobs, less than half of what was originally reported last month.

Although the government’s survey of employers showed them adding jobs, a separate survey of households showed that more people were out of work than in the previous month, causing the unemployment rate to rise to 9.2 percent.

[...]

The economy needs to add at least 150,000 jobs a month just to keep up with normal population growth. The protracted stretch of weak-to-moderate job creation over the last two years has left many of the people who lost jobs during the recession increasingly desperate. There are now 14.1 million unemployed, with 6.3 million of them having searched for work for six months or longer. Including those who are working part-time because they can’t find full-time work and those who have stopped looking, the broader unemployment rate is now 16.2 percent, its highest level since December 2010.

I'll say it again - no one gives a shit about the deficit except our horrible elected overlords. People want jobs and economic security, not Beltway boner-inducing summits and negotiations that produce zero results and do little else than tie Washington in knots and keep them from addressing the real crisis at hand. And make no mistake, that is the goal of the GOP's continued intransigence. If you consistently jump from one hostage crisis to the next (see government shutdown, debt ceiling), it paralyzes Washington and captivates the national media and leaves room for no other debate or policy initiatives. Why else do you think they are always insisting on temporary solutions? They want to keep having this dog and pony show again and again, because it means the administration and Congress can not focus on anything else.

It will be fun to see how the Obama team tries to spin their way out of this one when the 2012 drive heats up. I imagine they are supremely relieved at this point that their primary competition is a bunch of boring GOP back benchers. The economy doesn't need to continue to sputter like this. It does so because Washington has chosen not to address the problem, which is very fucked up when you think about it.