Unemployment ticks down, but remains far above goals

By Around the Web

(Unsplash)
(Unsplash)

By Will Kessler
Daily Caller News Foundation

The U.S. added 199,000 nonfarm payroll jobs in November as the unemployment rate ticked down to 3.7%, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data released Friday.

Economists had anticipated that the country would add 180,000 jobs in November compared to the 150,000 jobs that were added in October and that the unemployment rate would remain at 3.9%, according to Reuters. The number of jobs added in the month was boosted due to the resumption of work by autoworkers and actors who participated in the recent strikes.

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“If a person was striking and did not get paid during the pay period in which BLS conducts their surveys, then the person is not counted as a payroll,” E.J. Antoni, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “So, the end of the strikes could screw the nonfarm payroll figure (the headline jobs number) to the upside.”

The economy has produced a series of mixed indicators, most importantly above-trend economic growth in the third quarter of 2023, with gross domestic product seeing a 5.2% increase year-over-year, while consumer spending fell to its lowest point since March for the month of October.

Inflation has continued to remain above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target, rising 3.2% year-over-year in October, decelerating from the recent high of 9.1% in June 2022.

The non-partisan Leading Economic Index, which aggregates a number of different economic indicators, predicts that the economy will grow by only 0.8% in 2024, owing to a recession at the beginning of the year.

“Sectors like manufacturing are contracting and should show jobs lost last month. That will drive the year-to-date change in manufacturing jobs even further into the red,” Antoni told the DCNF. “We can also expect a continuation of the existing trend where government jobs are growing faster than many or all other subsectors. Since employment is a lagging indicator, the closer the jobs numbers go to zero, the more likely that we’re already in a recession.”

This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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IMPORTANT NOTE TO WND READERS: Shortly after Hamas terrorists fired over 5,000 rockets from Gaza into Israel on Oct. 7 and then proceeded to attack the Jewish state by land, sea and air – torturing, burning, beheading and murdering well over a thousand people, including women, children and infants, and wounding and abducting hundreds more – world reaction was, in its own way, almost equally shocking.

For after the biggest one-day mass slaughter of Jews since the Nazi Holocaust, what followed was an outpouring of celebratory demonstrations, unbridled Jew-hatred, deliriously gleeful support for Hamas and bitter condemnation of the nation of Israel. Not just in the Arab-Muslim world, but throughout the Western world as well, including all across America.

Why? What is behind the explosion of anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, pro-terror sentiment in the United States, where Israel has long been one of America’s closest friends and allies? Why are hordes of young “woke” LGBT demonstrators marching in support of Hamas – when Hamas wouldn’t think twice about binding and blindfolding them and throwing them off the roof of a tall building – as they routinely do in the Muslim world?

It turns out there’s one area of agreement that is so powerful, deep-seated and all-consuming that the vast differences between the deranged left and the murderous jihadists melt away into Kumbaya harmony.

All of this and much more is completely exposed in November’s issue of WND’s critically acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine, titled ISRAEL VS. GLOBAL JIHAD: How Jew-hatred, radical Islam and Leftism are pushing us toward World War III. Beyond a deeply insightful dive into why leftists are surging toward radical Islam – which hates and dreams of raping and butchering them – this Whistleblower issue includes fantastic articles by everyone from top Israeli analyst (and former Israel Defense Forces officer) Caroline Glick to Harvest Christian Fellowship’s Pastor Greg Laurie on the current war in Israel and biblical prophecies regarding the End Times … which he says are now upon us.

WHISTLEBLOWER is available in both the popular print edition and a state-of-the-art digital version, either single issues or discounted annual subscriptions.

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