CENSUS JOBS COUNT....

With the economy adding 162,000 jobs in March, the best month in three years, Republicans are left to come up with a new reason Americans shouldn't believe their lying eyes. The new argument is that the job totals don't really count, because so many of the new jobs are part of census-related hiring.


A couple of things to remember here. First, the RNC's claim is wildly misleading. Based on the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau hired 48,000 workers in March. Is that "most" of 162,000? Of course not.

Second, it's not uncommon to hear Republicans suggest census jobs aren't real jobs, in part because they're temporary. But this is a short-sighted way to look at this. Matt Yglesias had a good item on this earlier.


Exactly. Obviously, these aren't the kind of career opportunities that last, but it's not that much different from using stimulus money on an infrastructure project -- the government pays workers to complete an important task, and those workers are then able to spend on other good and services, which in turn helps the larger economy.

In other words, census jobs count, too.

The US economy added 162,000 jobs in March. Great news until you look more closely. In March, the federal government began hiring census takers big time. These are six-month temp jobs, and they tell us nothing about underlying trends in the labor market. It’s hard to gauge precisely how many were hired — probably between 100,000 and 140,000, although some estimates put the hiring as low as 48,000. Almost a million census workers will need to be hired over the next few months. Subtract these, and today’s job numbers are good but nothing to write home about.

There are some positive signs. Manufacturing payrolls expanded a bit, heath care employers added 27,000 jobs, and about 40,000 private-sector temp jobs were added. But payrolls continue to be slashed in financial services and the information industry.

Two big things to bear in mind:

First, government spending on last year’s giant stimulus is still near its peak, and the Fed continues to hold down interest rates. Without these props, it’s far from clear we’d have any job growth at all.

Second, since the start of the Great Recession, the economy has lost 8.4 million jobs and failed to create another 2.7 million needed just to keep up with population growth. That means we’re more than 11 million in the hole right now. And that hole keeps deepening every month we fail to add at least 150,000 new jobs, again reflecting population growth.

A census-taking job is better than no job, but it’s no substitute for the real thing.