Thirty-two months after President Obama promised his $820 billion economic stimulus would keep unemployment from rising above 8%, the Labor Department announced today that the United States economy added zero jobs in August as the unemployment rate held steady at 9.1%.
According to CNBC, this is the first time since 1945 that the Labor Department reported zero monthly job growth. It has now been 26 months since the recession officially ended in June 2009 when the unemployment rate was 9.4%. Over the same time period during the Reagan Recovery, unemployment fell a whole 3.5 points, from 10.8% to 7.3%.
The top line unemployment numbers were not the only bad news in the Labor Department report. The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (aka involuntary part-time workers) rose from 8.4 million to 8.8 million in August. The number of hours worked by all employees fell by 0.1 hours to 34.2 hours. And average hourly earnings also declined by 4 cents to $23.09.
The job gains for June and July were also revised downward. The Labor Department now says only 20,000 jobs (not 46,000) were created in June and only 85,000 (not 117,000) were created in July.
