The job news is bad: US Economy Created No Job Growth in August, Data Show:
Employment growth ground to a halt in August, as sagging consumer confidence discouraged already skittish U.S. businesses from hiring, keeping pressure on the Federal Reserve to provide more monetary stimulus to aid the struggling economy.
Nonfarm payrolls were unchanged last month, the Labor Department said Friday. It was the first time since 1945 that the government has reported a net monthly job change of zero. The August payrolls report was the worst since September 2010, while nonfarm employment for June and July was revised to show 58,000 fewer jobs.
President Barack Obama will address the nation on jobs:
President Barack Obama will unveil a new job growth package in a speech to be delivered in early September, a senior administration official told CNN Wednesday.
The president intends to spend much of this fall pushing a sharply divided Congress to pass the plan, the official said.
The administration has not finalized that package, but it’s likely to include tax cuts, spending on infrastructure and measures designed both to assist the long-term unemployed and bolster certain struggling sectors of the economy, the official said.
The speech is scheduled for Thursday night. The whole process of scheduling the speech has led to further questions about the President’s team and its understanding of the strictures they operate under. The White House had originally announced that the speech would take place on Wednesday night. Of course, the President has no right to conscript the chamber of the House of Representatives to give a speech. He has to be invited. The White House team never asked to be invited and that date conflicts with a long-scheduled Republican presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan Library.
Perhaps this could have been worked out had the President asked, but having tried to order around a co-equal branch of government, the House Leadership was in no mood to be cooperative and suggested the speech could wait a day.
The President had little choice but to bend and he did.
Then the focus of concern at the White House switched to the fact that they weren’t certain if very many people would care to listen to another presidential speech on the economy, especially if it conflicted with the Saints–Packers game. So they set the speech for an early 7:00 PM Eastern time – which is, of course, 4:00 PM Pacific Time: Obama Speech Won’t Conflict with Football.
‘I can assure all you football fans that he will be completed before kick-off,’ White House spokesman Jay Carney said.
The lack of interest is mostly because the president is said to be likely to rehash many small proposals that he has already made: Spend money on infrastructure, make schools more energy-efficient, extend unemployment insurance, etc. These ideas are small and exhausted and will neither help the President nor create many jobs.
The President could save his re-election prospects by unveiling a bold plan that would actually cause a jobs boom. We laid it out for the President a year ago in this piece in The American Thinker. Solving the Unemployment Crisis
