Jobs: Not As Bad As We Thought?

I would be remiss if I didn’t bring to your attention a press release today from the Labor Department. It announces that it has recalculated job gains and losses over the past few years and – drum roll please – we gained back more than originally thought. Specifically we undercounted the gains during the year ended in March 2012 by 386,000, or about 0.3% of all employment.

While this is of little comfort to our legion of long term unemployed it does throw a slightly – I mean slightly – different light on the recovery. The economy is still wallowing and adrift from the shores of safety, but it is a smidgeon closer to those shores than we all had been led to believe.

The impact of this revelation is marginal, to say the least, on economic policy. We still need a demand boost to get us firmly to safety. But the impact on the election could be much larger. The crucial point being that with this adjustment the economy has now generated more jobs than it lost during the Obama administration. There has a been a minor positive gain, rather than a less minor negative loss. This removes one of Romney’s last fact based talking points: that Obama has lost jobs. He hasn’t.

Not that this will prevent a hyperventilating right wing tirade about government rigging of the data. Nor will it stop Romney inventing facts to suit his argument – or, rather, avoiding ill fitting facts when making his argument. What it does is to arm Obama with one more small, but significant, victory as he prepares for the presidential debates.