With the government now shutdown, the monthly jobs report was not available on Friday morning like it usually is every month.
On that first Friday of the month at 8:30pm EST, the previous months jobs report is released. Due to Republicans and Democrats being unable to come to an agreement, the government was shut down at Midnight on October 1st. Many have been wondering what the monthly job numbers would be, but research done by economist Adam Hersh at the Center for American Progress took things a bit further.
Looking back at the last three years since the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, Hersh crunched the numbers and came to a shocking conclusion. If Republicans hadn't forced austerity economics on the American people, unemployment for the month of September would be south of 6 percent with a net gain of around 250,000 new jobs being created. Starting with December of 2010, the month after a Republican landslide in the midterm elections, there would have been 2.4 million additional jobs added to the economy, bringing the total to 8.2 million.
Hersh continues to explain the dramatic difference in economic policy and how much stronger the recovery would have been had the Republicans not had such a successful election in 2010.
"Applying standard fiscal multipliers—estimates of how much economic activity is generated by a dollar of public spending, about $2 for each dollar of spending—shows that the U.S. economy would be growing at an average of 3.3 percent a year, rather than 1.9 percent since 2010.
Admittedly, these output and employment counterfactuals are rough approximations of the scale of economic loss produced by fiscal austerity, but they give an idea of how costly that policy has been. This yawning gap in economic growth between our present and imagined anti-austerity worlds would make a striking impact on the U.S. jobs situation as well. Rather than adding 5.7 million jobs from January 2011 to the present, an America without the politics of austerity would have added an estimated 8.2 million new jobs—another 77,000 jobs every month."
Hersh also notes that the answer isn't simply more spending, but rather an investment across the board on bringing the United States back to where it needs to be.
"To be clear, increased government spending on jobs and public investment on its own is no panacea for the myriad economic challenges faced by American families and businesses still emerging from the Great Recession. Bolder policies are needed to bolster U.S. economic competitiveness through education, science, and infrastructure investment, as well as to redress runaway inequality that distorts economic incentives and undercuts America’s middle-class engine of growth."
Though the recovery is slow, it is a drastic improvement from when President Obama came into office in January of 2009. During the final months of the Bush administration, the United States was losing over 750,000 jobs a month. Currently, the average job gains are close to 190,000 jobs each month, an almost one million job swing. While Hersh and his numbers might not be 100 percent accurate, it does give a rough estimate of where the country should be if it wasn't for constant bickering and austerity driven polices pushed by the Republican party.
