It seems a metaphysical certitude the Obama-loving media will be falling over themselves in the next 48 hours to report the better than expected jobs numbers in June.
But will they expose the poor quality of those jobs, or just stick with the headline number?
Recall that when Bush was president, virtually every jobs report no matter how rosy was presented to the public with negative caveats.
They were always "low-paying." Remember?
By contrast, since employment bottomed in 2009, jobs reports that would have been met with skepticism under Bush have magically become far more upbeat.
This isn't to say the figures released by the Labor Department Friday are bad.
Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 195,000 in June, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 7.6 percent.
Expectations were for 165,000 jobs to be created and the unemployment rate to drop to 7.5 percent. So, as far as the headline figures are concerned, this was a good report.
But if you dig deeper, you'll find serious problems with the quality of these jobs. Our friends at Zero Hedge reported:
In June, the household survey reported that part-time jobs soared by 360,000 to 28,059,000 - an all time record high. Full time jobs? Down 240,000. And looking back at the entire year, so far in 2013, just 130K Full-Time Jobs have been added, offset by a whopping 557K Part-Time jobs.
Now imagine for a moment what a broadcast evening news report concerning these numbers would look like if a Republican was still in the White House.
Pretty dour, right?
Will any of the evening broadcasts or non-Fox News cable reports address the flies in the ointment here?
Or how about this:
The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) increased by 322,000 to 8.2 million in June. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.
As CNBC.com observed, "That pushed a more encompassing count of unemployment that includes discouraged and underemployed from 13.8 percent to 14.3 percent."
Also from CNBC.com:
While the actual employment level grew by 160,000, the unemployment ranks increased as well, by 17,000. [...]
Moreover, the quality of jobs was weak.
The bulk of the gains—75,000—came in the hospitality industry of bartending and waiters.
So not only did the number of unemployed actually increase, so did the number of discouraged and underemployed workers. And, more than a third of the jobs created were bartenders and waiters.
But there's more:
Among the marginally attached, there were 1.0 million discouraged workers in June, an increase of 206,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them.
So there are 206,000 more discouraged workers today than a year ago.
Somehow I envision media spending a lot of time on such problems with the June report if there was a Republican in the White House.
Will any of this surface with a beloved Democrat in the Oval Office?
Stay tuned.
