Reuters finance blogger Felix Salmon, Yahoo! Finance economics editor Dan Gross and “Viewpoint” host Eliot Spitzer analyze the June jobs report. The unemployment rate remained at 8.2 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the private sector added 80,000 jobs — by all accounts, a disappointing figure.
“The people who have jobs are actually doing OK, but the people who are coming into the workforce … they’re not getting jobs,” Salmon notes. “We’re creating this permanent underclass of unemployable people.”
Salmon and Gross both offer possible ways to get the economy moving again.
“One of Obama’s proposals is to give money to the states so they can simply stop laying off teachers. I mean, the idea that we have too many teachers in this country is absurd,” Gross says.
Salmon agrees: “It is not the government’s job in a recession to fire a bunch of good middle-class government workers.”
