The Briefing Room
General Category => Economy/Business => Topic started by: mystery-ak on April 05, 2013, 01:44:13 pm
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http://www.businessinsider.com/weak-jobs-report-not-about-the-sequester-2013-4 (http://www.businessinsider.com/weak-jobs-report-not-about-the-sequester-2013-4)
The Scary Thing Is That This Bad Jobs Report Wasn't Even About The Sequester
Joe Weisenthal | 55 minutes ago | 14,561 | 19
The March jobs report has come in very mediocre.
It'd be nice to blame the sequester (the automatic spending cuts that started in March) but it doesn't even appear to be about that.
A series of tweets from WaPo's Zachary Goldfarb points out that this really more likely to be about the expiry of the Payroll Tax Holiday (as the job losses fell in the retail sector) rather than the sequester (seeing as there was not a big decline in professional services).
Zachary A. Goldfarb @Goldfarb
This jobs report is more a story of the impact of the payroll tax hike than the sequester.
12:36 PM - 05 Apr 13
So while retail fell 24K, that was not the case with professionals services.
Neil Irwin @Neil_Irwin
Professional and business services, which includes lots of gov't contractors, was +51k jobs, well within its recent range.
12:38 PM - 05 Apr 13
When/if the sequester bites, then that's yet another area for a let down.