It is rare you see Republican politicians, even if they view Palin as dumb, crazy or in it for profit, actually say so. But Jon Huntsman did: “There’s too much drama and theater in politics. I mean come on. You string people along. Everybody who has anything to do with politics knew she wasn’t going to get in the race. She has a profit proposition, she’s got a business. She makes money doing what she’s doing.” And thus, Jon Huntsman’s career as a Republican is now over.
The jobs picture gets a little better. The private sector added 137,000 private sector jobs. The public sector cut 34,000 jobs in the tragically stupid push for austerity. The numbers for July and August are also revised up to reflect 99,000 unreported new private sector jobs. The economy has now created 1,074,000 jobs this year, 1,343,000 jobs in 2010, for a grand total of 2,417,000 since the end of the Great Recession. But we lost 9,079,000 in the Great Recession. So we need to create 6 million more jobs just to get back to where we were in 2007. The charts show we are headed in the right direction, but the economy needs more demand. And you don’t create demand by spending cuts and laying off people. That hurts demand. Which is why the American Jobs Act is so important. We got a big hole to climb out of, and we keep kneecapping ourselves with stupid austerity cuts and public job layoffs.
