Summer is approaching and nerves are jangling. In recent years the
green shoots of the early months withered in the heat of summer. The
queue of people worried that this summer will be another in which a
recovery is aborted is long: the unemployed, retailers, investors,
President Barak Obama and his team, incumbent congressmen of both
parties, home builders, and car salesman—to name just a few. Mitt
Romney, although not one to wish the nation ill, would be less than
human if he did not feel a frisson of excitement at every bit of news
that suggests the green shoots won’t flower until after the November
elections.
Friday’s
jobs report provided the Republican contender with just such a frisson.
Only 115,000 jobs were created in April, and the unemployment rate
dropped from 8.2 percent in March to 8.1 percent, the lowest level since
Barack Obama took the oath of office in January of 2009, but only
because thousands more workers gave up the job hunt. If those
discouraged workers had remained in the work force, the unemployment
rate would be in double digits.
GDP, which grew at the satisfactory rate of 3
percent in the final quarter of 2011, managed only a tepid 2.2 percent
growth in the first quarter of this year. That’s half the growth rate of
all our recoveries since World War II. Some economists estimate that
unseasonably warm weather—the warmest since 1895—added 0.2 percent to
growth. Worse still, 0.6 percent of the first quarter growth in output
merely swelled inventories of unsold goods. Back out the weather and
inventory build-up, and growth comes to a measly 1.4 percent. Business
investment declined at an annual rate of 2.1 percent. A bad start to the
year—bad enough, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, “to give the word recovery a bad name.”
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