Small businesses accelerate hiring, help drive unemployment down to four-year low  

By J.D. Harrison, Published: May 3 (Washington Post)

Slowly but surely, small businesses are starting to accelerate their pace of hiring, helping drive down the overall unemployment rate to a four-year low last month.

Small business owners increased employment by an average of 0.14 workers per company in April, according to the latest report from the National Federation of Independent Business. That’s still slow growth by historic standards, but it marks the fifth consecutive month of gains after a topsy turvy year in 2012.

Hmmm? Five straight months. Let's see, that means the unemployment picture was starting the "recovery" in December, just after the election. So what happened I wonder? Did small bidnez get so pumped at the prospect of four more years of Obama that by golly they just had to go hire some folks? Just a second, let me think about this....hang on...I think it's coming to me...yes I've got it! The Compost is full of horse-derves. 

Here's the thang, yeah there's more jobs, but they're PART-TIME jobs. As El Rushbo explains:

Let me stick with this. “While the American economy added 293,000 jobs last month,” again, these are government numbers, “according to the separate Household Survey, the number of people employed part time for economic reasons,” i.e., “involuntary part-time workers…” That’s what the Labor Department calls them: Involuntary part-time workers These are people that have their hours reduced. That number of people employed part time for economic reasons “increased by 278,000 to 7.9 million, largely offsetting a decrease in March.

“These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.” At the same time, the U-6 unemployment rate — which is the number people out of work and the number of people who have given up and are no longer counted in the U-3 number — that number went up. It’s 13.9%.
The U-6 unemployment rate, which includes discouraged workers and part-timers who want full-time work, went from 13.8 to 13.9%.

And there’s more. There was a two-tenths of an hour decline in the length of the average workweek. I mean, this stuff gets detailed and filled with minutia. But the nut of it here is that it’s a part-time economy, and the number of involuntary part-time workers is skyrocketing. Now, remember, the economy added 293,000 jobs last month. The number of people employed part time increased by about the same: 278,000. So we’re not adding careers, is how I look at it.

We’re adding part-time people whose hours are being reduced because of Obamacare. There are anecdotal reports like this one from the Los Angeles Times: “Consider the city of Long Beach. It is limiting most of its 1,600 part-time employees to fewer than 27 hours a week, on average. City officials say that without cutting payroll hours, new health benefits would cost up to $2 million more next year…” So the City of Long Beach, in order to save $2 million that it does not have, has reduced the workweek for 1600 people that work for the city down to 27 hours.

So the idea the economy is recovering because of these new jobs is absurd, especially when everybody knows jobs are the trailing not leading indicator of economic recovery. No, what this is is a leading indicator of the destruction ObamaCare is about to wreak on our already weak and mismanaged country. But I'm sure this kind of BS plays well with some folks, like those at the Washington Post.