«The White House had spent the previous week trying to blunt the impact of Friday morning’s unemployment figures — but it may not be enough to soften the blow of government statistics that show the nation’s unemployment rate remains stuck at 9.7 percent.
White House economic adviser Larry Summers and Democratic economists had tried to “pre-but” the release of the February numbers with an argument that last month’s "snowpocalypse" in the Northeast corridor significantly affected Americans’ ability to get to jobs.
According to data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy shed an additional 36,000 jobs, leaving the grim number of 14.9 million people out of work. Earlier in the week, Summers predicted that the number would be artificially low for February because some snowed-in workers weren’t paid for hours they didn’t work. "The blizzards that affected much of the country during the last month are likely to distort the statistics," Summers told CNBC.
Some economists predicted the snow effect could shift the jobs number south by as much as 100,000. Other economists weren’t so sure — and Republicans can be expected to pounce on a dismal jobs report, snow or no snow.
The loss of 36,000 jobs announced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, then, is significantly less than many had expected — the Obama administration argued that there could have been job growth in February had it not been for the storm.
"Although the labor market remains severely distressed, today’s report on the employment situation is consistent with the pattern of stabilization and gradual labor market healing we have been seeing in recent months," said White House Council of Economic Advisers Chairwoman Christina Romer in a blog posted Friday. "The impact of bad weather on the February employment number was likely substantially negative."
Nonetheless, the political reality is harsh for the Obama administration. With just eight months to go before Election Day, there is almost no way for the economy to rebound to the point at which it would make a significant dent in the out-of-work population. Even an economy that grows at 100,000 or 200,000 jobs per month will have a long way to go before chipping away significantly at the more than 14 million unemployed.
That presents a political opportunity for Republicans, who argued that the Obama administration’s yearlong battle to pass a controversial health care bill has distracted it from working on the issue Americans care about most: jobs.
“Mother Nature is a force to be reckoned with, but it’s the blizzard of higher taxes, wasteful spending and reckless borrowing coming out of Washington that’s destroying jobs in this country," said House Republican leader John Boehner (R-Ohio). "President Obama and Democratic leaders will come out of the woodwork today armed with rehashed promises to do better, but their top and seemingly only priority remains this unpopular, unaffordable government takeover of health care."
But Democrats, too, have an argument to make — they will very likely point to Kentucky Republican Sen. Jim Bunning, whose days-long effort to block an extension of unemployment benefits collapsed this week in the face of weakening Republican support. And Democrats have already floated one obscure economic statistic to help make their case: In 1996, severe snowstorms did affect the monthly jobs report, they say, but the next month’s report rebounded by just as much — meaning we can expect the March report to be much sunnier.»
in Politico.com
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