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Jobs growth tepid: Another month, another miss

Jobs growth remained tepid in the US this month, according to the monthly numbers released from the BLS today. Employers did not create enough jobs growth to keep up with the backlog of almost 13 million unemployed workers.

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Paul Sancya/AP
In this June 2012 file photo, a military veteran receives a job interview in Detroit. The Labor Department said Thursday that weekly unemployment benefit applications dropped by 14,000 to a seasonally adjusted 374,000, the fewest since the week of May 19, but job growth remained anemic.

Another month another miss for the key unemployment report out of the BLS. Non Farm Payrolls were an anemic 84K vs a consensus that hovered just over 100k.  Obama can blame the weather or the lack of a Triple Crown contender or any thing he wants, it won't matter.  The three month average for this quarter just ended is 75k new jobs per month - a joke in the context of a 155 million person labor force.

Of note is the fact that the unemployment rate for college educated Americans is now 4.1% vs the total average of 8.2%.  if that isn't testimony to the fact that this is a structural and not just a cyclical problem, I don't know what is.  We have vast amounts of people who simply lack a skill set that renders them necessary for the technologically savvy, services-oriented economy we're morphing into.  This is a fact, not an opinion.  The only question we can debate is whether or not this will cycle back around and we'll see a new manufacturing renaissance.

I have no idea.

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