The Long Road Back

The April jobs report came out today and again the news was good.  The economy gained 244,000 jobs last month, with the private sector gaining 268,000 jobs and the public sector shedding 24,000.  This has been the trend for some time now, with private sector job growth outpacing the overall jobs number because the public sector is shrinking.  Although the March and April numbers are still preliminary, we've added 768,000 jobs in the first four months of 2011 and, leaving off January, we've gained 700,000 jobs in the last three months.

Although the unemployment rate rose to 9.0% from last month's rate of 8.8%, this is less important than job growth for reasons that I won't get into here since this is already going to be wonkish enough as it is. I will say, however, that the makeup of the unemployed has shifted, with far more people unemployed for less than five weeks and far fewer unemployed for more that twenty-seven weeks. This too is welcome news.

If the good news is that we're on the road to recovery, the bad news is that it's an extremely long road. Primarily because our population grows, we need to add more jobs to the workforce just to maintain the status quo. Specifically, we need to add at least 125,000 new jobs every month or 1.5 million every year, and that's a conservative estimate. Many economists use 150,000 a month or 1.8 million new jobs a year and, frankly, this higher number is historically sound. In the 1960s when the population was smaller, we added over 17 million jobs, and in the decades of the '70s, 80s and '90s we added over 18 million jobs in each. Over the forty years from 1960 through 1999, we added an average of about 160,000 jobs a month. Nevertheless, I'll use the 125,000 number. Now, let's look at the facts and do the math.

In the Great Recession we lost millions of jobs, but the periods before it and after it were also marked by anemic job growth, and we mustn't forget the 1.5 million jobs we need to add annually just to keep up. In the last 11 years, from May 2000 through April 2011, we should have added 16.5 million jobs, but over that period we actually lost 632,000 jobs, leaving us with a shortfall of more than 17.1 million jobs that we need to make up, over and above the 1.5 million per year we need to add going forward if we want to get back to where we were 11 years ago when Clinton was president.

If we add 225,000 jobs every month, that would mean 2.7 million a year. The only president to exceed that over his entire presidency was Bill Clinton, although, believe it or not, Jimmy Carter was closest with a rate of over 2.6 million for his whole presidency. I know Sean Hannity likes to say that we lost 10 million jobs under Carter, but once again he's wrong and we gained over 10 million jobs under Carter. LBJ also added well over 2 million jobs a year and Ronald Reagan, although falling short of 2 million a year for his entire tenure, did manage to do so for one of his two terms.

In any event, even if we can add jobs at a rate of 2.7 million a year over a sustained period of time, when you consider that 1.5 million of that is just to tread water, it won't be until September 2025 that we can get back to where things were in May 2000. That's a 25+ year long national nightmare. We need to focus on job creation or we'll condemn an entire generation of Americans to the eroded peace of mind that attends our woeful employment picture. I'm begging everyone to keep their eyes on the ball and ignore those who would use wedge issues to divide us and render us unable to solve our real problems.

And They'll Know We Are Christians by Our...Hate? Wait, That Can't Be Right

The funeral for Elizabeth Edwards will take place this afternoon in Raleigh, North Carolina.  Her grown daughter and two preteen children will look on as she's laid to rest beside her son who died at the age of 16.  To anyone with even a shred of human decency, this is a heartbreaking scene.  It's hard to imagine feeling anything but compassion for this family and an innate desire to somehow ease their suffering.  However, I'm sad to say that there are people who don't have a shred of human decency.  Enter our very own Star Spangled Taliban, the Westboro Baptist Church.  They are sending a contingent of their hate merchants who will be celebrating her death, brandishing signs saying, among other things, "Thank God for breast cancer" and otherwise doing what they can to salt the wounds of the suffering children who have just lost their mother.

The perverse irony is that these sadistic monsters are perpetrating this viciousness in the name of God.  There is nothing divine about their inhuman cruelty, and claiming that it's done to worship The Prince of Peace is like honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. by denying blacks the right to sit at the front of a bus.  This is apparently lost on people like Fred Phelps.  Because religion should and does foster the best elements of humankind, I still find myself unable to make peace with the fact that religious fundamentalism and zealotry are responsible for humanity at its absolute worst.  Whether we're talking about al-Qaeda or the Westboro Baptist Church, the depravity of these warped fundamentalists, comes from an abyss of hatred and evil whose depth is difficult if not impossible to plumb.

Luckily, these cretins from the WBC have marginalized themselves by visiting their unique brand of ugliness upon the grieving families of military personnel who gave their lives, generally at a very young age.  Otherwise, I fear that they might have wider appeal among religious conservatives in this country.  Remember that in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson went on television to advance the view that we were deservedly attacked because, among other things, we don't sufficiently subjugate women or mistreat gays and lesbians.  Thus, in the view of Robertson, Falwell and the intolerant millions for whom they speak, God apparently lifted His magical force field protecting our country just so innocent masses could be slaughtered as a cautionary tale whose moral is to be more judgmental and intolerant.  To his credit, President George W. Bush, himself a conservative Christian, immediately repudiated this filth.  We must remember that while Pat Robertson and those like him would be in the fringe of any other advanced society, he is in the mainstream in this country.  In 1988 he finished second in the Iowa caucus for the Republican presidential nomination.  Eventual nominee and president, George H.W. Bush finished third.

First Amendment protection applies equally to everyone in this country including the wretched, despicable hatemongers from the WBC and I wouldn't want it any other way.  They have the right to worship as they choose, to speak freely and to protest, although like all rights certain reasonable restrictions may apply.  Freedom of speech is, however, a two-way street and good people must stand up and say in no uncertain terms that what Fred Phelps and his minions do is an unmitigated disgrace, deplorable in the eyes of anyone with a scintilla of decency or Christian charity.