(Reuters/Jason Reed)U.S. President Barack Obama answers a question during a news conference at the White House in Washington. Obama said that the U.S. economy needs a jolt and that Europe's debt crisis could have a real effect on America, as he touted his $447 billion plan to create jobs. October 6, 2011
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Labor statistics released Friday show that the U.S. unemployment rate dropped last month to 8.6 percent, the lowest since March 2009. But Republicans say it’s still too high to signal improvement and that many Americans have given up on their job searches, thus causing the rate to decrease.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that the unemployment rate fell by 0.4 percentage point to 8.6 percent in November, its lowest level in two and a half years, which President Barack Obama applauded as a sign of improvement “despite some strong headwinds this year.”
However, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich argued that the sharp drop in the jobless rate was mostly because some 300,000 Americans had given up looking for work. “The Obama model of class warfare, government takeovers in the economy and creating fear and uncertainty for job-creators have failed,” said Republican presidential candidate Gingrich.
Republican House Speaker John Boehner said while any job creation was welcome news, “the jobless rate in this country is still unacceptable,” as it “marks the 34th consecutive month of unemployment above 8 percent.”
Former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney said the sustained rate of over 8 percent was “the longest such spell since the Great Depression.” “The Obama administration may have come to accept such a high level of joblessness as the new normal. I will never accept it,” he said in a statement.
GOP presidential hopeful Romney added that Americans “can’t afford another year of President Obama’s failed economic policies. And we certainly can’t afford five more years. This is not exactly the hope and change that the American people bargained for.”
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Minn. Rep. and GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann referred to discouraged workers, saying, “My heart breaks as we approach the holidays for American families who have been abandoned by this president so that he can implement his radical agenda.”
Paul Ballew, chief economist for the insurance and finance company Nationwide, cautioned that the jobless rate could easily rise again as more people enter and leave the workforce. “It’s always important to keep in mind, the unemployment rate can bounce around, depending on who is actively looking for jobs,” CNN Money quoted him as saying.
Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rate for adult men fell by 0.5 percentage point to 8.3 percent in November. However, the rates for adult women showed little change, mostly because more women had left the labor force.
A separate survey of employers showed that companies had added 120,000 jobs in November. And President Obama seemed to suggest that the worst is over. “The American economy has now created in the private sector jobs for the past 21 months in a row,” he said in Washington Friday. “That’s nearly 3 million new jobs in all, and more than half a million over the last four months.”
Democrats could see hope in President Ronald Reagan’s re-election in 1984, when the jobless rate was 7.4 percent at the time of election, down from 8.5 percent a year earlier and as high as 10.8 percent in 1982. However, with a financial crisis underway in Europe, there is no guarantee that unemployment will continue to show a downward trend, economists warned.
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