I watched the opening of SNL last night, which must have aired originally in February or March, because the first sketch was a President Obama impersonator explaining what will have to be cut from the budget due to the sequester.
My favorite mock cut was the astronaut who said they will no longer have visors in their space suits, so they’ll just have to hold their breath when they do space walks.
That also reminded me of a Wall Street Journal article (though I’m not sure is the original article that I read) this week that made a good point that the jobs report is pretty good a few months after the gloom and doom that was supposed to follow the sequester spending cuts.
(As a side note to WSJ.com editors, it is extremely tough to find an article that is more than day or two old. It’d be nice, especially for the opinion section, if you just had a calendar archive that listed links to the articles that ran on certain days.)
From today’s IBD re: the “pretty good” jobs report:
“In short, this jobs recovery isn’t solid. It’s pathetic.
It’s even worse when you consider all of the net addition to June jobs — repeat, all — were part time. Compared with the 360,000 part-time positions created, full-time employment shrank by 240,000.
Year to date, only 130,000 full-time jobs have been added to our economy. The rest of the jobs — 557,000 — have been part time.
And tucked deep into the jobs report was this little tidbit: The underemployment rate, which measures those working in a job for which they’re overqualified, or working part-time when they really want full-time work, shot up from 13.8% to 14.3%.
This isn’t a solid jobs report. It’s a crisis.”
Read More At Investor’s Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/070513-662689-us-shifts-to-a-part-time-economy.htm#ixzz2YTN0kty9
Eeks. Thanks for sharing. The devil is always in the details. I use ‘pretty good’ liberally. Relative to recent reports, I don’t believe it was all doom and gloom as the administration would have had us believe 3-4 months ago.