So, it’s been a rough January — a second month of anemic job creation, a new CBO report saying that ObamaCare could cost 250,000 jobs and continuing blasts of arctic froideur that have shut down even the redoubtable Alter Group offices for days.
This is when perspective matters: Cassidy Turley takes a 6-month long view in the US Employment Tracker to find good news:
Taking this approach, the U.S. economy is creating a monthly average of 178,000 net new jobs, consumer spending is growing at an annual rate of 3.1% and the ISM manufacturing index has been a robust 60.6.” Also, after the usual revisions in the economic data, we found that “real GDP grew at an annualized rate of 3.2% in the final quarter of 2013, driven by the largest increase in consumer spending in three years. Business confidence is now at an 11-year high; consumer confidence has held up; fiscal policy is less of a drag; and the Fed is now tapering because it generally likes what it sees. Commercial real estate fundamentals have been consistently tightening for three straight years. Although the past few weeks have allowed some doubt to resurface, the outlook remains upbeat.
Then there’s the matter of looking at the right statistics for you. Such as the fact that office-using jobs that drive so much of commercial real estate have been on a tear recently — 34,000 in January. Overall office-using jobs have surpassed pre-recession levels (after bottoming out in 2009).
We can’t take a long view on bone-chilling temperatures but let’s look at the Obamacare costing a quarter million jobs. Here’s portion of the CBO report, “The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2014 to 2024.”:
The ACA’s largest impact on labor markets will probably occur after 2016, once its major provisions have taken full effect and overall economic output nears its maximum sustainable level. CBO estimates that the ACA will reduce the total number of hours worked, on net, by about 1.5 percent to 2.0 percent during the period from 2017 to 2024, almost entirely because workers will choose to supply less labor —given the new taxes and other incentives they will face and the financial benefits some will receive.
And therein lies the key phrase — “choose”. In other words, it is not jobs that will be eliminated but workers who will elect to retire, stay at home to raise the kids or go to a 3-day schedule so they have time to get another degree. They won’t feel tethered to their current employment because of the fear of not having health coverage.
