After months of disappointing economic news, Friday’s job numbers came as a pleasant surprise. The economy created a net 271,000 jobs in October, a figure that beat low expectations and doubles disappointing job creation numbers of the prior two months. The official unemployment rate also fell to 5 percent, although that number has a different meaning in an era of dramatically lower workforce participation.
Unfortunately, the recovery still hasn’t arrived for those most in need of work, civilian adults aged 25-54. These men and women are the backbone of the labor market. They are in the period of their lives when people normally build families, careers and businesses. Instead, since 2008, millions of them have been idle, waiting for their lives to begin.
Eight years ago, there were 100.2 million people in this age range who had jobs. Last month, there were only 97.1 million, a number that has barely budged in 2015. Worse still, the latest Labor Department numbers suggest that most of the net jobs lost by that core age cohort have been full-time jobs. In the fourth quarter of 2007, when the Great Recession began, there were 80.5 million full-timers aged 25-54; it the most recent quarter there were only 77.7 million.
The Baby Boom generation has aged out of this category and its overall population has shrunk slightly, by 700,000 in the last eight years, to 125.2 million. But even assuming that every single person who grew out of that age range took a job with them into the next age range, this would account for less than a quarter of the jobs that have vanished into thin air.
Meanwhile, President Obama chose Friday to announce that he is rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline. With his decision, designed to make him look good in front of the international community who will start climate talks in Paris on Nov. 30, he is nixing tens of thousands of jobs and, according to his own State Department, $100 million in earnings for American workers. He made his decision even though his own State Department has concluded that the pipeline, which would bring Canadian and North Dakota crude oil to the Gulf Coast, would emit less carbon than other, more dangerous, methods of transporting it, such as by rail. The final State Department recommendation was that the pipeline be rejected because it would create a “perception” that would “undermin[e] the power of U.S. example as a leader in promoting the transformation to low-carbon economies.”
Got that? The Obama administration just prevented job creation to avoid a foreign “perception.” Note the timing here, too: Obama has been slow-walking Keystone for more than six years and rejected it only when voters could no longer punish him for flouting the Keystone hopes they have clearly expressed to pollsters.
So the labor market had a decent October, but the man in charge still either does not know or does not care to bring back the sort of dynamism that vanished late last decade. Voters would do well to choose a president who does not represent a third term for this failed ecomonic policy.
