JOBS

Hey, for once, a decent month:

Nonfarm payroll employment increased by 308,000 in March, and the unemployment rate was about unchanged at 5.7 percent.

Again, since it takes just shy of 150k jobs monthly to keep up with population growth, this is reasonably good news. For Bush, who promised 306,000 jobs monthly from his latest round of tax cuts, this is also good news, and we'll be sure to see him trot out there and tell us all about how those glorious tax cuts are working.

Of course, there are some necessary caveats. First of all, this is just one month, and we'll need to see a few consecutive months of likewise job growth for this to be a real turnaround. The administration promised this sort of growth every month as a result of their tax cuts. Second, Bush is gonna have to create even more jobs per month than that for the rest of 2004 in order to have created a single net job in the course of his administration.

More: Note that the unemployment rate stayed about the same. If I had to guess -- and aside from one quarter each of macro and micro, I'm no economist -- then that means that some people who had quit the workforce, and thus had not been counted in previous months as part of the unemployment rate, had re-entered the search for new jobs in March, meaning that despite the new 308k jobs, there were more people to be officially counted as unemployed.

The quandry for Bush is -- and I remember Max talking about this -- is that if the job situation continues to improve in future months, the unemployment could rise significantly, as a great many formerly-disheartened working-age Americans move back into the potential workforce and are counted as unemployed. I'd say that since Bush put a positive spin on the reverse of this trend in previous months -- that the unemployment rate went down when people left the work-force altogether -- he knows that a rising unemployment rate is probably fair game for criticism.

Lastly, Max also notes:

The magic number for March is a gain of 308,000, in and of itself very good news. That's how many jobs were gained according to the "Establishment Survey." By contrast, the counterpart for the less-accurate Household Survey is a loss of 3,000.

In previous months, when the Household Survey was reporting better job numbers than the Establishment Survey, can you guess which set of numbers the Republicans were supporting?

Everything being said, 308,000 new jobs added in March is good news.