Chart of the Day: The Real Employment Picture

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Another day, another lousy jobs report. The Washington Post headlined it like this:

Job creation in U.S. comes to a halt in August

At the risk of being tiresome, this isn’t correct. We need to add about 150,000 jobs each month merely to keep up with population growth, which means that real net job growth is negative and has been for over a year. The chart below shows real net job creation over the past three years. We should do something about this. How about a trillion dollars for infrastructure?

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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