Obama calls jobs report “step in the right direction”
Obama said 28 straight months of private-sector job growth is nothing to sneeze at, but “it’s still tough out there for those out of work.”
President Obama said at a campaign stop in Ohio Friday that the June jobs report is “a step in the right direction.”
The report showed that the economy added 80,000 jobs, not enough to keep up with population growth and restore the jobs lost in the recession, and the unemployment rate stuck at 8.2 percent. The unemployment rate for Latinos remained at 11 percent for the second straight month.
But Obama said that the economy has created jobs for 28 straight months after rapidly shedding jobs month after month when he took office. He touted the fact the economy has created 4.4 million jobs during that span, including 500,000 jobs in manufacturing, a crucial sector in the battleground state of Ohio.
“That’s a step in the right direction,” Obama said, referencing the fact that private sector firms created 84,000 jobs, but not the 4,000-job decline in government employment. “But we can’t be satisfied but our goal was never to was just to keep on working to get back to where we were in 2007.”
Obama acknowledged that “it’s still tough out there” for people to find work (12.7 million remain out of work).
“We’ve got to grow the economy even faster and we have to put even more people back to work,” Obama said.
In an appearance earlier in New Hampshire, where he is vacationing, Romney blamed Obama’s policies for the frozen jobs market.
“The president’s policies have not gotten America working again, and the president is going to have to stand up and take responsibility for it,” Romney said.
But Obama countered that his policies helped stop the bleeding and credited his bailout of American automakers for saving U.S. manufacturing jobs. The president said that Romney would implement policies that are essentially the same as previous Republican administrations, which he said helped cause the 2008 financial meltdown.
Alan Krueger, the chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said in a statement earlier Friday that the public shouldn’t read too much into one jobs report, noting that the overall unemployment rate is down nearly one percentage point from where it was one year ago.
“The monthly employment and unemployment figures can be volatile, and employment estimates can be subject to substantial revision. Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report,” he said.
