Recovery Summer

Private employers added just 1,420 jobs per state in July — not nearly enough to make up for job losses in the government, 50,000 of which were local-government layoffs. Unemployment remains high, at 9.5 percent, and many economists expect it to track higher in the fall. Calculated Risk demonstrates the waning recovery with this graph:

Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, gave this flash analysis of the numbers: “The net loss of jobs reported in today’s employment report captures a job market stuck in neutral. Roughly one in six workers are either unemployed or underemployed, and the labor force continues to decline. It is time for the government to do substantially more to create jobs so the backlog of unemployed workers can get back to work.”