Jobs Report Has White House On The Ropes, Playing Defense
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Austan Goolsbee
The drumbeat of sobering economic news in the country has the White House on the defensive.
White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, in an appearance Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” objected testily to the use of the term “jobless recovery.”
“It is not a ‘jobless recovery.’ That is an incorrect phrase,” Mr. Goolsbee told host Christiane Amanpour. “After the last recession, in this comparable period post-recession, we had lost 100,000 jobs. We have added more than 200,000 jobs.”
Mr. Goolsbee, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said, “There’s a major difference between a jobless recovery and a very deep hole that we’re climbing out of.”
The White House is defending its economic programs after Friday’s Labor Department report on May unemployment showed that the nation is treading water on jobs.
In his weekly address on Saturday, President Obama acknowledged the problems with the jobs report.
“We’ve got a ways to go. Even though our economy has created more than 2 million private-sector jobs over the past 15 months and continues to grow, we’re facing some tough headwinds. Lately, it’s high gas prices, the earthquake in Japan and unease about the European fiscal situation. That will happen from time to time. There will be bumps on the road to recovery,” he said in a speech taped at a Toledo, Ohio, auto plant.
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