First, the report was stronger than expected, a development they are loath to acknowledge just four weeks before the election. Second, while the data suggests improvement, it also highlights the need for federal spending to maintain and create jobs, which Congressional Republicans have blocked and which Mitt Romney rejects. Employers added 114,000 jobs last month, which would have been very disappointing but for upward revisions of employment growth for July and August, totaling another 86,000 jobs. The unemployment rate fell, from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent last month, a welcome drop, though it appears to be partly due to a statistical fluke and partly to more part-time employment, which is better than no work, but hardly the sign of a reliably robust job market. What it does not reflect, as some conservative commentators have charged, is manipulation of the data by the Obama administration, an allegation that insults federal statisticians and only shows how desperately Republicans want bad economic numbers to use to attack the president. They seem to have little interest in promoting improvements that might actually help people. There is one important number in the report that barely budged from previous months. The share of jobless workers out of work for six months or more remained extremely high, at 40 percent, or 4.8 million people, of which more than half had been out of work for more than year. And finding a job remains difficult: in July, the latest month for which data on job openings was available, nearly 13 million jobless workers were competing for 3.7 million openings. Long-term joblessness is largely a measure of the depth of employment loss during the recession from the end of 2007 to mid-2009. Its persistence means that a top priority now is to extend federal jobless benefits, which kick in when state unemployment insurance benefits run out, generally after 26 weeks. Federal benefits are now phasing out and are set to expire at the end of the year. If they are not extended, two million workers will be cut off during the holiday season. Anyone who became unemployed in July or later would be eligible for state benefits only. For many people, those benefits will run out before they find new work. In general, the federal benefits provide an additional 14 weeks of support, and up to 33 weeks beyond that in states with especially high unemployment. President Obama strongly supports an extension, but Republicans have typically balked, and have pressed successfully for less generous benefits. And with so many controversial budget cuts scheduled to occur at the end of the year, including military spending reductions and the expiration of both the payroll tax cut and the Bush tax cuts, jobless benefits have come to be viewed as a bargaining chip in negotiations over those and other items. But a delay in extending those benefits, or worse, allowing them to be cut off entirely, would be a mistake; it would remove crucial spending from the economy and cause real suffering for a vulnerable population. It would also make the current Congress the most heartless in modern history: lawmakers have enacted emergency federal unemployment benefits in every major recession since 1958, and have never allowed the program to end when unemployment has been anywhere near as high as it is now.
