The July jobs report is in and the according to the latest report, 162,000 jobs were added in July and the unemployment rate dropped to 7.4%. "It’s a report that I described as kind of symptomatic as an economy that is stuck in maybe second gear,” economist Jared Bernstein said on Friday’s show. “We are far away from going backwards so we are reliably not looking at recession, but we are not going fast enough to quickly absorb the slack that is still left over from the great depression.”
One group that is being hit the hardest is the millennials. As kids graduate from college they either can’t get a job or are finding very low paying jobs. “One of the things that bothers me is college only gives you a learning permit, like in driving. You have to get some experience to really become valuable,” Professor Peter Morici of Smith School of Business said. “If you miss out of the first five years of your working career spending time at Starbucks, you just dropped out of the system. Then when the economy picks up these people are going to be passed over for the new college graduates and they are never really going to get going.”
As Jared and Peter have pointed out on The Cycle before, there are things that can be done to fix the economy. "Whether we are talking about a President Bush or President Obama. Whether we are talking about the Republicans or the Democrats they seem to not really want to address those structural problems," Morici said. "Arguing over sequestration and jiggling around what the tax rates have been... lowering taxes is going to give you a little bit of a boost but it doesn't fix what’s fundamentally broke!"