Sluggish Job Growth May Threaten Recovery

Sun February 8, 2004 11:33 AM ET
By Andrea Hopkins

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Another month of disappointing job growth in America has sown a seed of worry among analysts that the fragile economic rebound may not be strong enough to last.

For months now, economists have been forecasting an improvement in employment. Each month, they've been disappointed, and the news from January was no different.

While 112,000 jobs were created and the unemployment rate dropped to 5.6 percent -- the lowest in two years -- forecasters, traders and economists had been expecting much better. Most had hoped to see payrolls jump by 150,000, with the more optimistic estimating gains of 300,000.

"It's just flat-out disappointing. We're just not creating many jobs," said Steven Wood, chief economist at Insight Economics in California.

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You cannot sustain an economic recovery with a record federal deficit. All the tax cut did was stimulate a short-term burp in consumer spending without creating any real sustenance for the national economy. The current reckless morass with unbridled GOP spending and talk of yet more tax cuts will inhibit real investment that produces real jobs.