Bleak Jobs Report

There’s no getting around today’s job report being just really bleak. 18,000 jobs is nothing against the need to add roughly 10 times that number just for the economy to produce enough jobs to keep up with population growth. (The rate itself rose to 9.2%) And it brings the country perilous close to going back to net jobs contraction. We are living with the consequences of inadequate government action in early 2009, poor policy choices and a basic misdiagnosis of the scale of the crisis the country faced. But then, we know that. Perhaps the starkest thing to contemplate is that these numbers raise the odds of new policy choices — sucking still more demand out of the economy in the form of sharp spending cuts — most likely to steepen the economy’s descent.