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WILL: If the workforce participation rate were as high today as it was just 12 months ago, the unemployment rate would be 8.3 percent. If the workforce participation rate were as high today as it was when Mr. Obama was inaugurated, the unemployment rate would be over 10 percent.

Think about that statement for a moment. Will is actually arguing that job growth under Obama... growing at a rate of more than twice what is needed just to keep up with population growth, and actually produced a 0.2% decline in the Unemployment Rate last month... isn't growing fast enough to make up for the economic catastrophe created prior to President Obama taking office, and therefore is a failure. According to the Fox "business" Channel, jobless claims are actually on the decline.

And sooooo... what? We should return to the GOP economic policies that created the disaster in the first place?

For reference, by this point in Bush's presidency, the unemployment rate had gone from 4.2% the month he took office to 5.4% in March of 2005 following the longest post-war economic expansion of the 20th century and two consecutive balanced budgets under President Clinton (by contrast, unemployment has fallen under President Obama from 7.8% to 7.7% following the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and a $1.4 TRILLION dollar Deficit).

This morning, the much anticipated "Jobs Report" for October... the last Jobs Report before the election next Tuesday... was released as scheduled, revealing that 171,000 jobs were created last month, a strong jump from the "114,000 jobs" reported last September. The September number was also revised upwards to "148,000". The Unemployment Rate also rose to 7.9% as many long-term unemployed, encouraged by recent job growth, reentered the labor market once again searching for work.

Businesses picked up their pace of hiring in October and the unemployment rose as more people started looking for work, according to new government data that offer a glimmer of optimism for the long-ailing job market on the eve of the presidential election.

Employers reported adding 171,000 jobs in October, beating both analysts’ expectations (125,000 jobs added) and September’s rate of job creation (a revised 148,000).

The unemployment rate rose to 7.9 percent, up from 7.8 percent, but the details of why point to improvement in the job market as well. Some 578,000 more Americans counted themselves as part of the labor force, and only 410,000 more people reported having a job. In one welcome sign, the proportion of the population reporting that they had a job ticked up a tenth of a percent to 58.8 percent.

Even the "bad news" graph shows that MORE people are working today than the day President Obama took office, and that the monthly job creation figures have been steadily increasing since September of 2010 (before Republican election gains in November of that year.)

This report is more good news for President Obama going into next Tuesday's election, though there is no question that the Romney campaign will cite the uptick in the unemployment rate as bad news. Last month, Republicans accused the Obama Administration of tweaking the Unemployment Rate as a political ploy prior to the election. This month, it will be interesting to see how quick those same Republicans are to accept the BLS figures and the uptick in the rate as accurate.

Continuing their jihad against fact-based evidence, Laura Ingraham and The Combover are absolutely convinced that today's announced uptick of unemployment benefits claims prove that THE BLS IS IN THE TANK FOR OBAMA ZOMG!1!1!

It's unclear, however, why they believe one group of Obama administration bureaucrats but angrily dismiss another out of hand.

Anyway, yesterday, Gallup had the unadjusted unemployment rate in the US at 7.3% -- it's lowest number yet.

Great news, right?

But to review: the BLS is shilling for Obama, as is the Gallup organization -- but the St. Louis Fed isn't.

Glad we cleared all that up.

From the Wall Street Journal, columnist Justin Lahart takes a look at how state and local job losses drove up the unemployment rate. Let's remember that the states run by Republican governors insisted on paying for tax cuts by laying off government workers, and that the Republicans in Congress and their Blue Dog enablers who blocked government spending to the states did their part, too. (Remember "jobs, jobs, jobs"? Thanks, Grand Old Piranas!)

One reason the unemployment rate may have remained persistently high: The sharp cuts in state and local government spending in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and the layoffs those cuts wrought.

The Labor Department’s establishment survey of employers — the jobs count that it bases its payroll figures on — shows that the government has been steadily shedding workers since the crisis struck, with 586,000 fewer jobs than in December 2008. Friday’s employment report showed the cuts continued in April, with 15,000 government jobs lost.

But the survey of households that the unemployment rate is based on suggests the government job cuts have been much, much worse.

In April the household survey showed that that there were 442,000 fewer people working in government than in March. The household survey has a much smaller sample size than the establishment survey, and so is prone to volatility, but the magnitude of the drop is striking: It marks the largest decline on both an absolute and a percentage basis on record going back to 1948. Moreover, the household survey has consistently showed bigger drops in government employment than the establishment survey has.

The unemployment rate would be far lower if it hadn’t been for those cuts: If there were as many people working in government as there were in December 2008, the unemployment rate in April would have been 7.1%, not 8.1%.

Ceteris is rarely paribus, of course: If there were more government jobs now, for example, it’s likely that not as many people would have left the labor force, and so the actual unemployment rate would be north of 7.1.

Economist Jared Bernstein adds:

A few additional points, if I may:

• these are real jobs by real people of the type you see everyday when you drop your kid off at school, get a speeding ticket (whoops…bad e.g., but you know what I mean), or pass a firehouse. You see their work when you go to a soccer game at a public field that’s in decent shape or stroll in a public park.

• there’s a significant multiplier to state and local spending, both in terms of contracting out work to private entities and spending by public workers in their communities (Zandi puts it at 1.4–for a dollar of state fiscal relief, GDP grows $1.4).

The amoral and inaccurate Sen. Pat Toomey, lying wingnut extraordinaire, speaks at last week's PA Leadership Conference. He looks moderate compared to what the Corbett administration does to the poor.

The Republican relationship with economic health is akin to that of a leech and its host, which is why I will no longer refer to Republican "leadership." From here on out, it's "bleedership", especially in my home state of Pennsylvania under the Tom Corbett administration:

While many panelists at this weekend’s Pennsylvania Leadership Conference complained about the Pennsylvania government being too big, a new study shows Pennsylvania may be the poster-child for a stagnant unemployment rate due to state level cuts under Republican leadership.

Bryce Covert and Mike Konczai illustrate a painfully obvious point in The Nation regarding the Commonwealth’s cutting of public jobs and enacting partisan social legislation. And while Pennsylvania may be the most obvious example used by the authors, we’re one of many states undergoing a conservative transformation to the dark side.

Republican state legislators, empowered by new control of the governorship and the state house, proposed one of the most stringent mandatory ultrasound bills in the country. The House passed a voter identification law that could block 700,000 Pennsylvanians from voting, most of them young, of color, and poor. Meanwhile, the same state legislators led a successful charge to shrink public employment. The number of government employees fell over 3 percent that year, one of the sharpest declines in any state.

The piece goes onto to explain that “Pennsylvania isn’t alone.” In fact, as we’re all likely aware, 2010 was a blood red electoral year, and happened because those Republicans promised massive job growth if they only got the chance to rule over us. Lots of swing and oft-blue states went red. The result: the economic and social equivalent of a tire iron to the face. In those 11 states where Republicans have taken control since January 2011, “public sector layoffs are disproportionately concentrated, leading to one of the biggest rounds of job losses for the public workforce since record keeping began.” And with that has come a massive increase in conservative bills meant to limit voting by minorities and the poor, and limiting abortion rights.

In 2011, Pennsylvania state and local employment by the state legislature dropped by more than 3 percent, according to the article. Corbett’s lowering of the corporate tax rate and imposition of a low effective tax rate on drilling the Marcellus Shale have “made the deficit even worse.”

“There could have been fewer layoffs than there were,” said Mark Price, an economist based in Pennsylvania. “They could have avoided this.” As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has found, many of these newly GOP-dominated states, including North Carolina, cut corporate taxes, or cut taxes on high-income earners, including Maine and Ohio. Wisconsin did both.

I don't believe they wanted to avoid this. Repeat after me, class: Cheap, disposable labor with no legal protections! It's the Holy Grail of the Grand Old Party.

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No, Rick, it's not the government's job to create jobs. It's the government's duty to prevent you from getting contraceptives, to insert vaginal ultrasound probes to make you rethink your decision to have an abortion, and to subsidize your tuition at a for-profit charter school! (Oh, and to do the bidding of what his pals in Opus Dei and C Street tell him to do.) Seriously, that crap may play in the far-right fringe voters that make up your party's primary voters, but you really think the rest of the country wants to hear that particular tune?

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum said in Illinois on Monday that he was not concerned about the unemployment rate because it wasn’t the government’s duty to create jobs.

“We need a candidate who’s going to be a fighter for freedom,” he said during a campaign speech, “who is going to get up and make that the central theme in this race because it is the central theme in this race.”

“I don’t care what the unemployment rate’s going to be,” he continued. “Doesn’t matter to me. My campaign doesn’t hinge on unemployment rates and growth rates. It’s something more foundational that’s going on. We have one nominee who says he wants to run the economy. What kind of conservative says that the president runs the economy? What conservative says I’m the guy, because of my economic experience, that can create jobs?”

“I don’t know. We conservatives generally think that government doesn’t create jobs. That what government does is create an atmosphere for jobs to be created in the private sector.”

"Doesn't matter to me"? Spoken like someone collecting a big fat wingnut-welfare paycheck.

Not that this study will make much of an impact anyway, because we all know worry about job growth isn't the real reason the House majority won't extend unemployment benefits. They simply want people to be so desperate, they'll even vote for Republicans:

Generous unemployment benefits have had little effect on the unemployment rate, according to a new study that may help ease concerns that benefits give sidelined Americans a disincentive to hunt for jobs.

Yes, because not being able to pay your mortgage, buy food or put gas in the tank isn't quite disincentive enough. Sometimes I think these economists would get better results if they became voodoo doctors.

Unemployment insurance, which is available for up to 99 weeks in some states, nudged the jobless rate up 0.2 to 0.6 of a percentage point higher than it would have been otherwise, according to a new paper by Jesse Rothstein, a University of California, Berkeley economist and released at the Brookings Institution this week.

“Any negative effects of the recent unemployment insurance extensions on job search are clearly quite small, too small to outweigh the benefits of transfers to people who have been out of work for over a year in conditions where job-finding prospects are bleak,” according to the report.

Economists generally agree that extended jobless benefits increase the unemployment rate. But they disagree on how big the effect is and how damaging that is to the economy.

Generous unemployment insurance can increase joblessness if Americans who are out of work don’t search as hard as they otherwise would have for new jobs. They can also give recipients a reason to hold out for better-paying jobs. Those impacts can be a negative for the economy because it means instead of reentering the job market, sidelined workers are relying on the government for assistance and staying unemployed for longer.

Yes, because as any austerity cheerleader will tell you, it's very important that workers get used to the fact that they're now permanently competing for Third World wages.

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And don't get me wrong, Obama could use some advice. But sadly, Brooks' current advice does not involve inventing a time machine and going back to February 2009 to fire Tim Geithner. Because that's really the only advice at this point that would do Obama any good.

At any rate! Brooks is once again upset that the President has, for the time being at least, decided that allowing the Republicans to defecate on his face is not a winning political strategy. In fact, he thinks that Obama learn from Bill Clinton circa 1995 and start focusing on school uniforms:

But Democrats can win elections in this climate if they defuse the Big Government/Small Government ideological debate. With his Third Way approach, Bill Clinton established that he was not a Big Government liberal. Once he crossed that threshold, he could get voters to think about his individual policies, which were actually quite popular. Clinton made a national election feel like a state election (state and local governments are still trusted and voters are less ideological when voting for those offices).

Well, OK, but Brooks seems to be forgetting that the big reason that Clinton actually won the election: The economy, stupid. Unemployment was coming down from its peak in the early '90s and people were feeling pretty good about their financial situations.

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