Good News, Bad News for Job Market

When the novel coronavirus turned into a full blown pandemic over eight months ago now, America started suffering job losses that have never been seen before. Even during the Great Depression of last century, more Americans kept their jobs than they did during the Covid-19 crisis. However, as spring settled in on the northern hemisphere, jobs started to come back to America, to the tune of net positives of millions per month. This trend has continued, though at a pace so slowly now that many economic experts are staring to panic while warning people to brace for round two of a joblessness surge.

So, the good news is that America's economy bounced back in a very strong way after tens of millions of jobs were lost. The thing about these jobs was that, for millions of people, they weren't just lay-offs or temporary closures while the virus abated. Instead, they were outright shutters, from businesses that went entirely bankrupt and no amount of grant money or stimulus spending could save them. Though America bounced back. The bad news, what goes up must come down, and now we see job creation numbers peaking while experts worn of a precipitous decline.

Over Labor Day weekend in America, the New York Times ran a piece that illustrated quite well the potential issues we're facing with slow job growth. In a nutshell, America's an economy that's driven almost entirely by the types of jobs it's able to create in a capitalist system. The fear here is that even though more jobs are being created, the fact that it's a slow drip now instead of a pour will allow the unemployment numbers to catch back up. One thing that helped save America's job economy was the fact that many states ended their lock-downs early and greatly loosened the restrictions on business. Though while this helped spur job growth, it also spread the coronavirus around to millions of more people, and the end result of that could be more shut-downs, only more complete and lasting longer this time. This, of course, could lead to a lot more jobs lost than America dealt with the first time around.

All told, however, things are looking solid now, though leveled off. During the month of August, the United States added 1.4 million net jobs. Though just two months prior in June, there were 4.7 million jobs added. Economic experts warn of this sharp decline when juxtaposed against what could very well happen were the nation to go into another complete economic shut down.

The Jobs Report and Stimulus Spending

A lot of Democrats and a few Republicans have been pushing for yet another round of stimulus spending for the entire month of August. What they fear is that we'll have a month where the net number of jobs found do not come close to matching up with jobs lost, and thus Americans are going to suffer. Though what's keeping a new stimulus package from receiving widespread support is the fact that every month since April, the jobs report has been pretty strong. And after President Trump signed an executive order to keep paying unemployed Americans extra federal unemployment payments, most Republicans do not see a need to spend another few trillion dollars.

This doesn't sit well with the Democrats, however. Since the first stimulus bill, they have been fighting tooth and nail to get a variety of spending initiatives into a spending bill, such as lower carbon emissions for airplanes and additional funding for post offices so that they can have nationwide mail-in voting for November's Presidential Election. Though more than the money being the catalyst for Republicans not supporting the bill en masse, it's the fact that they claim Democrats just want to spend money on their pet projects, not the actual suffering Americans. So we're again at a standstill in terms of new stimulus spending, but polls show that attitudes around the nation are positive and most Americans are getting what they need.

In terms of what the nation needs, economists claim that we need to keep seeing a million or more jobs added every month, until hopefully a Covid-19 vaccine is released to the population and we can finally get this virus behind us all. Whether or not that will happen in the coming months is anyone's guess. Some university experiments report being close, but no one knows just how close. Until then, many economists are worried.