lackluster recovery (cont'd)

When will the Keynesians (and more of the American people) learn?

Here are the WSJ editorialists...

Another week, more evidence of the lackluster economic expansion. This time the message came in yesterday's jobs report for April, which revealed more modest job creation. That's surely better than nothing, but it's well below what you'd expect nearly two years into a recovery after a very deep recession. Americans should not have to accept this as the "new normal."

The good news is that private payrolls jumped by 268,000 jobs, the third month in a row of gains greater than 231,000. The jobs came across a variety of industries...

The private gains offset the loss of 24,000 government jobs, the sixth consecutive month of such declines. This is also good news. Propped up by the Obama stimulus, public payrolls are bloated and unsustainable....

The disappointing increase in the overall jobless rate—to 9% from 8.8%—reflects in part an increase in the number of Americans seeking work, which is a sign of confidence that they believe they may find a job. The real story here is the failure, after 21 months of growth, to cut the jobless rate more rapidly from its 10.1% peak in October 2009.

On the plus side, the number of Americans who are jobless for six months or longer fell by 283,000, though they are a still worrisome 43.4% of all the jobless. More troubling is the big jump in April in the jobless rate for blacks (0.6% to 16.1%), Hispanics (0.5% to 11.8%) and teenagers (0.4% to 24.9%).

As ever, slow growth hurts the least skilled the most, and that usually means the young or least educated. Even as many manufacturers report difficulty finding skilled workers for high-paying jobs, the bottom rung of the economic ladder remains out of reach to hundreds of thousands...

Sara Murray in the WSJ on the growth in payrolls, despite the higher unemployment rate...

So far this year, the economy has added 768,000 jobs and the Labor Department revised up the prior two months to show job gains were stronger by a total of 46,000.

Still, the economy has a massive jobs hole to fill. As of April, there were 13.7 million Americans out of work and another 8.6 million who wanted to work full-time but could only find part-time jobs...

And Sara Murray again in the WSJ on gender-specific aspects of the recession and now the recovery-- in a word, men struggled more but are recovering quicker...

The recent recession was labeled by some a "man-cession," because of sharp employment cuts in male-dominated fields...

The unemployment rate for men, on average, was 10.5% last year. By April it had declined 1.1 points to 9.4%...Joblessness among women was less common: Their unemployment rate was 8.6% on average last year. But...by April, the unemployment rate for women had fallen just 0.2 points to 8.4%.

A large part of the problem is that women are disproportionately represented in state and local governments—and that is where many jobs are being cut now....

About 18.2% of employed women work in the public sector. They are nearly 50% more likely to hold public-sector positions than men, according to the Labor Department....