from Anthony Wile, The Daily Bell:
Brad Plumer recently posted an article at the Washington Post‘s Wonkblog entitled “July jobs report: Why the unemployment rate just won’t budge.”
Plumer was responding to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that the US economy added a disappointing 163,000 jobs in July. The unemployment rate traveled up from 8.2 percent to about 8.3 percent.
This set off a flood of articles in the mainstream media that interpreted this figure as negative, inconsequential or possibly “good news” for President Barack Obama‘s re-election campaign.
In this article, I want to show why a much deeper discussion should be taking place.
But first, I’ll examine several issues around which the current “mainstream” debate is occurring.
It is, to be sure, a kind of dominant social theme, of course … that the White House is engaged in frantic efforts to reduce the unemployment problem in the United States and that Obama’s re-election chances hang in the balance.
