It's still Bush's fault: the U.S. economy looks like it's losing jobs again

So says James Pethokoukis, the economic expert that Paul Krugman wishes he could be.

The private sector is not fine, as some extremely worrisome economic news today emphasizes.

The government’s April Job Opening and Labor Turnover report was, in the words of JPMorgan economists, “soft, lending some credence to the view that the April-May slowing seen in the payroll report was real and not a statistical fluke.”

– The number of job openings in April fell 325,000 to 3.416 million. That’s the lowest level since November of last year.

– But here is the real red flag. Private job openings fell 282,000 — the most since early 2009 — to 3.080 million. Early 2009, if you recall, saw the economy just hemorrhaging jobs.



– One bright spot in this report in March was the rising in people quitting their jobs, showing some confidence in the economy. But that “completely reversed itself in April.”

This comes on the heels of last month's report that the Labor Force Participation Rate is the lowest since 1981.

So if this administration isn't doing its best to implement The Cloward-Piven Strategy, it's doing a damn fine imitation.