Jared Bernstein Quotes (66 Quotes)


    People think unemployment is still relatively low, but there's all the difference in the world between a tight labor market and a weak one when you're talking about employees' ability to bargain for a fair share of growth.

    A fundamental principle of our economic system is that the benefits of economic growth will flow to those responsible for their creation. When how fast your income grows depends on your position in the income scale, this principle is violated. In that sense, today's unprecedented gap between the growth of the typical family's income and productivity is our most pressing economic problem.

    In the absence of immigrant labor, wages might be a bit higher, particularly in sectors that hire lots of low-skilled labor, which could potentially show up as slightly higher prices.

    Many of our overall indicators are percolating along just fine, but the growth continues to elude many working families, especially those in the middle and low end.

    I'm not sure this report convinces us that a recovery is underway in the labor market in any big way.


    This doesn't look like a significantly different report than we've gotten in past months, but that's significant in itself. The labor market is clearly stuck in neutral.

    This decline in the jobless rate is certainly the largest drop we've seen in recent months, so it does suggest a stronger labor market than we expected.

    The jobless recovery remains with us, and the job machine is stuck in neutral at this point.

    It's a pretty classic story of an economy that's leaving middle-income households behind. The gap between how this economy's doing and the living standards of the median family has never been larger.

    Folks at the top of the income scale definitely notice when they're paying 3.50 a gallon for gasoline. But for them, that doesn't necessarily mean they are going to have to cut back elsewhere, ... Younger families have lower incomes.

    Nationally we think it's impossible to say exactly when we've reached full employment. But it sounds like in Florida you're there.

    Folks are coming back into the labor market, but they're not finding jobs there. The tepid pace of job growth was too low to keep unemployment from rising. We're looking at a fairly weak recovery, at least initially.

    The weakness in the labor market is clearly reducing the growth of earnings, meaning consumers, most of who depend on their paychecks, are likely to remain insecure about where the economy is headed. This in turn has the potential to constrain consumption

    We're looking at a recessionjobless recovery that's two years old to the day.

    This is what a healthy job market looks like we just haven't seen it for a long while, so it makes inflation hawks nervous.

    There is no reason to believe...that Congress has authorized the Department of Labor to dramatically reduce coverage...taking overtime protection away from millions of workers. Yet that is exactly what the Department of Labor has proposed.

    These are workers who have the weakest bargaining leverage and are most likely to be exploited, particularly in a period where you have a weak labor demand and a large labor supply.

    When income growth is concentrated at the top of the income scale, the people at the bottom have a much harder time lifting themselves out of poverty and giving their children a decent start in life.

    More people are coming in to the labor force, and we're not creating enough jobs to put much downward pressure on the unemployment rate. But this is better news than expected.

    I'm definitely ready to believe that the rate of job loss has slowed and that soon we will be adding jobs. The question is, will we be adding enough to keep unemployment from rising

    Home appreciation was offset by lousy wage growth and debt accumulation.


    This isn't an administration that wakes up and says 'what can we do for the working class family today,'

    (The) 43,000 new jobs is much too small a number to lower the unemployment number. The unemployment report underscores that the recovery is off to a slow start. The Fed will most certainly not raise (interest) rates in the near-term.

    I've been pretty happy to see the pace of job growth in professional services.

    They also focus on two areas - healthcare and energy - where inflation is eating away at spending power. You either need wages to pick up or inflation to slow down, ... There may be a bit of both in coming months.

    I wouldn't be surprised if unemployment held constant or dropped a tenth of a percentage point. But will that signal we're heading back to a healthy labor market No, because the economic fundamentals, in terms of growth, just aren't there.

    Explaining the unique characteristics of this unbalanced recovery is more like 'Murder on the Orient Express' than finding a smoking gun in somebody's hands. There are a lot of suspects.

    In a strong economy, hours and output can both grow, so long as output grows at a faster rate, thus resulting in productivity growth. But... productivity can also grow in a slowdown or recession, when a decline in hours outpaces weak or nonexistent output growth.

    This could mean that the labor market is another area coming on line in the nation's recovery.

    We did not see the tremendous upsurge in injuries we thought we might get, ... It gets really difficult when it is tremendously hot during the night - not just when it is really hot days, but when it is really hot weeks.

    This report may give pause to some of the optimists looking for a stronger second half, ... We need a real boost if we're going to reverse some of these trends that are even more negative than we thought they were.

    Maybe by the second quarter of next year, we'll be looking at some lower unemployment rate -- say in the 5 to 5.5 percent range, if we're lucky. But that would be the best to hope for, and it's based on our working through these excesses that persist.

    American companies really haven't been sinking much of their gains back into domestic investment.

    These losses may reflect the fact that consumers facing higher energy prices and falling real inflation-adjusted wages are cutting back on discretionary spending.

    It's a mistake to think that any increase in wages is inflationary and there is substantial room for non-inflationary wage growth, particularly at the bottom end of the scale.

    The economy's doing fine, except if you figure in working families. We're posting great numbers in aggregate demand, yet the lousiest on record for wage growth.

    These numbers reveal a labor market that's not bouncing back quickly enough to absorb new entrants along with the people laid off during the downturn.

    The inflation bar is very high right now, ... doesn't get you over.

    If you're a native high school dropout in this economy, you've got a slew of problems of which immigrant competition is but one, and a lesser one at that.

    Clearly, Katrina hasn't shown up in the jobless claims yet, but it will, ... Next month, we're going to be looking at one of the largest one month negative spikes in the history of this series, going back to the '30s.

    Economists said the data suggested a long-awaited change in the outlook of employers, a movement away from years of reluctance to add new workers. The rate of job creation from 2000 through mid-'04 was just stuck in the cellar, ... and this was an underappreciated, ongoing cause of the jobless recovery.

    We have welcomed past efforts by the Bureau to offer alternative poverty measures. Their most recent release, however, ignores critical innovations and omits essential costs like child care for working parents and thus represents a step backwards.

    will make it harder for working families to truly get ahead.

    This is a tremendously detailed, comprehensive look at the American family's balance sheet and it ain't pretty.

    This is a pretty negative report. The reason unemployment ticked down is the labor force contracted. That suggests fewer people are getting into the game, looking for work, and that kind of discouragement can lead to a lower unemployment rate.

    It's too soon to call this a 'jobless' recovery, ... but another quarter or two of these types of reports, and that probably will be a relevant title.

    Yet this peppering of data notwithstanding, economists are not too sanguine about the immediate prospects for income growth on the bottom rungs of the wage scale. The job market is slowly tightening, ... We are wringing out the slack. But we're only six months into a process that could take a year and a half.


    This report shows a race between factors boosting net worth such as home ownership and factors pushing the other way such as weak wage growth. Unless we start to see better income growth from jobs and wages, it is hard to see major gains in net worth for the typical family.


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