Private Sector Employment

There are a few different reasons you might want to focus on private sector job growth, per this Steve Benen table:

1. We happen to have had a lot of census hiring and un-hiring in 2010 that has nothing to do with underlying economic trends.

2. Conservatives claim to believe that a structural shift involving declining public sector employment is a good thing so we should take their claims seriously and ignore the “fake jobs” working for the government.

3. Private sector data just makes things look better, so it’s good spin for the White House.

The problem here is that private sector jobs are increasing at a pace that’s not adequate to reduce the unemployment rate. The labor force grows over time, so if you want to reduce idleness you need jobs to grow faster than that. To execute the conservative strategy of point 2, private sector employment would need to grow much faster than the overall labor force. The best news is this neighborhood was actually in the revision of the July data, which showed that last month was actually quite a bit better than initially reporter. Still, the point is that even this patch of good news is not in fact very good.