Ask the Expert: Heather Boushey on March’s Job Numbers

What do today’s jobs numbers say about the economy?

Today’s jobs were actually extremely positive in some senses—192,000 jobs were created, the unemployment rate fell to 8.9 percent. That’s good news, and certainly means that the job market is improving, and it’s moving in the right direction. However, we need to see a lot more jobs created each month in order to soak up all of the unemployed folks out there who need work. And at the pace of job creation that we’ve seen over the past three months we won’t get back to 5 percent unemployment until about 2033, which is quite frankly inexcusable. So while today’s numbers are good, we need to see even better numbers in the future so we can get back to full employment.

How will conservatives’ proposed cuts hurt job growth?

The House-passed budget for fiscal year 2011 will do serious damage to our economy. Economists estimate—actually, economists at Goldman Sachs who are advising clients on where the economy is headed—they estimate that this House-passed budget bill will actually reduce economic growth by 1.5 to 2 percentage points in the next couple of quarters. That’s significant, and it means that this is not really not putting our economy on the right track. And the second problem with this House-passed budget bill is it not only strips the economy of necessary demand right when we can ill afford it, but it does so in ways that actually reduce our investments in the future. So it’s bad in the short term, bad in the long term. They cut investments in infrastructure, they cut investments in education—things that will actually help our economy grow and thrive in the long term. So quite frankly, this budget is not good for our economy.

What do we need to do to create jobs and spur economic growth?

Well, at this point in the economic recovery we still need to focus on boosting and maintaining aggregate demand in order to create enough jobs to soak up all the unemployed. There’s a survey that comes out every month from the National Federation of Independent Businesses. These are small business owners. And what they report month after month is that they need to see sales. They need to see customers coming through the door. And so that’s one of the most important things that policymakers can do, is to make sure that we maintain federal spending, help the states and localities maintain their spending so they’re not laying people off and reducing sales for small-, medium-, and large-scale businesses all across the country. The second thing we need to do, is that now is the right time to invest in infrastructure in the United States. Interest rates are low, there’s a lot of unemployed people, there’s a lot of unemployed resources. Let’s put those people and resources to work reinvesting in America. The American Society of Civil Engineers says we need to spend over a couple trillion dollars over the next five years just to upgrade our infrastructure to where it should be. So those are the kinds of investments we should be making now and they’ll create jobs in the short term.