Jared Bernstein Quotations

Whether we're into another period now where employers are turning really cautious again ... warrants close observation,

Ultimately unemployment will peak somewhere around 6.2 or 6.3 percent,

We are in the midst of a protracted wage slump, ... a troubling trend that is largely going unnoticed by policymakers.

It's a mistake to think that any increase in wages is inflationary and there is substantial room for non-inflationary wage growth, particularly at the bottom end of the scale.

With stagnant hourly wages, the only way for working families to get ahead is by working more hours, ... certainly not the path to improving living standards that we'd expect in an economy posting strong productivity gains.

Where you see immigration competition play out most clearly is among high school dropouts. I'd say there's clearly immigrant competition among the least-skilled workers, but natives are a shrinking share while immigrants are a growing share.

The government should be actively enforcing the high road.

The full employment situation reinforces itself.

The bottom line is that it's better to run a workforce on security than insecurity.

Did folks know that the tax to fund the program [Social Security] only hits salaries up to $110,000? That means that if you make a million bucks, about 90% of your salary is tax free when it comes to the payroll tax that funds Soc Sec. That ain't right.

What you don't hear from these GOP candidates is that they really can't go after this president on domestic production of oil and gas. He's actually done quite a lot. In fact, I would suspect they're environmentalists who are worried that we're doing too much drilling and fracking, in fact. I know that for a fact.

We've seen we can drive the economy at 4 percent unemployment with strong productivity gains. I won't be satisfied until we're back there. Many working families won't be either, I'd guess.

When income growth is concentrated at the top of the income scale, the people at the bottom have a much harder time lifting themselves out of poverty and giving their children a decent start in life.

When unemployment is that low, wages are growing broadly, and family incomes are rising. Wage-based demand growth keeps the economy growing at potential.

When the storm hits, you have tremendous devastation. The ripples in the outer reaches of the economy will be visible, but not enough to derail us.

We're looking at a recession/jobless recovery that's two years old to the day.

Many of our overall indicators are percolating along just fine, but the growth continues to elude many working families, especially those in the middle and low end,

Maybe we were looking under the wrong rock.

Of course there are jobs that few Americans will take because the wages and working conditions have been so degraded by employers. But there is nothing about landscaping, food processing, meat cutting or construction that would preclude someone from doing these jobs on the basis of their nativity. Nothing would keep anyone, immigrant or native born, from doing them if they paid better, if they had health care.

Maybe by the second quarter of next year, we'll be looking at some lower unemployment rate -- say in the 5 to 5.5 percent range, if we're lucky. But that would be the best to hope for, and it's based on our working through these excesses that persist.

I and others have been looking desperately for silver linings in this tragedy and if Katrina were to motivate Congress to look at this issue seriously, that would be great.

Given the growth of the population and labor force and improvements in productivity, we need to be adding somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000 jobs per month to nudge unemployment down.

He talks about lending a helping hand to the poor and disadvantaged. But these policies push the other way, toward lower wages and less racial inclusion.

has primarily to do with the compensation the typical worker earns.

I think the fingerprints of a faltering job market are all over this report. We've got more people working, but they're failing to get ahead.

Lawmakers need to focus on stimulus, and this report is really a wake-up call in that regard.

Nationally we think it's impossible to say exactly when we've reached full employment. But it sounds like in Florida you're there.

My problem with the Bush plan is that it's so ideologically problematic that now these guys are going to have to argue about it for a month or two. That's bad because we need to inject stimulus into the economy quickly.

(The) 43,000 new jobs is much too small a number to lower the unemployment number. The unemployment report underscores that the recovery is off to a slow start. The Fed will most certainly not raise (interest) rates in the near-term.

will make it harder for working families to truly get ahead.

We have welcomed past efforts by the Bureau to offer alternative poverty measures. Their most recent release, however, ignores critical innovations and omits essential costs like child care for working parents and thus represents a step backwards.

Unless working families can give up food and gas, this combination of slow wage growth and faster inflation continues to pinch.

The problem isn't simply that families are facing higher prices, particularly at the pump. It's also that they're facing lower wages. If wages were keeping pace with inflation, the pinch wouldn't be as hard.

We did not see the tremendous upsurge in injuries we thought we might get. It gets really difficult when it is tremendously hot during the night - not just when it is really hot days, but when it is really hot weeks.

We did not see the tremendous upsurge in injuries we thought we might get, ... It gets really difficult when it is tremendously hot during the night - not just when it is really hot days, but when it is really hot weeks.

You don't need an equitable distribution to have a sustainable recovery.

This report shows a race between factors boosting net worth such as home ownership and factors pushing the other way such as weak wage growth. Unless we start to see better income growth from jobs and wages, it is hard to see major gains in net worth for the typical family.

This report may give pause to some of the optimists looking for a stronger second half, ... We need a real boost if we're going to reverse some of these trends that are even more negative than we thought they were.

Firms were trying desperately to maintain the levels of output without expanding the work force, and in some cases contracting it.

Firms have to be very concerned about rising prices. They're protecting their profit margins. They're going to be looking at every nook and cranny to absorb this increase.

Explaining the unique characteristics of this unbalanced recovery is more like 'Murder on the Orient Express' than finding a smoking gun in somebody's hands. There are a lot of suspects.

While we continue to generate middle-class jobs, I would say we're doing so at a slower pace than we have in the past.

There is no reason to believe...that Congress has authorized the Department of Labor to dramatically reduce coverage...taking overtime protection away from millions of workers. Yet that is exactly what the Department of Labor has proposed.

As this recovery gets under way, professional services have begun adding jobs fairly broadly.

Enough people said exactly that ? I tend to believe them.

Folks at the top of the income scale definitely notice when they're paying $3.50 a gallon for gasoline. But for them, that doesn't necessarily mean they are going to have to cut back elsewhere, ... Younger families have lower incomes.

Folks are coming back into the labor market, but they're not finding jobs there. The tepid pace of job growth was too low to keep unemployment from rising. We're looking at a fairly weak recovery, at least initially.

I've been pretty happy to see the pace of job growth in professional services.

These are workers who have the weakest bargaining leverage and are most likely to be exploited, particularly in a period where you have a weak labor demand and a large labor supply.

These results reveal the breadth of the unprecedented gap between the pace of overall economic progress and the returns to working people.

People think unemployment is still relatively low, but there's all the difference in the world between a tight labor market and a weak one when you're talking about employees' ability to bargain for a fair share of growth.

Our expectations have been pretty diminished. A good month used to be 300,000 more jobs and now it is 200,000.

A fundamental principle of our economic system is that the benefits of economic growth will flow to those responsible for their creation. When how fast your income grows depends on your position in the income scale, this principle is violated. In that sense, today's unprecedented gap between the growth of the typical family's income and productivity is our most pressing economic problem.

One good month based on a swing in the C.P.I. does nothing to change this negative trajectory.

A number of other reports suggest the labor market is finally hitting its stride, one weekly claims number is not enough to undermine that conclusion.

Any large fall in labor force participation at this point suggests that the labor market is not growing out of recession, but rather that discouraged job seekers are giving up, or not beginning, their job search.

You need to create ever more jobs in order to absorb increases in the labor force as well as productivity gains.

This is a pretty negative report. The reason unemployment ticked down is the labor force contracted. That suggests fewer people are getting into the game, looking for work, and that kind of discouragement can lead to a lower unemployment rate.

This is a tremendously detailed, comprehensive look at the American family's balance sheet and it ain't pretty.

This isn't an administration that wakes up and says 'what can we do for the working class family today,'

The weakness in the labor market is clearly reducing the growth of earnings, meaning consumers, most of who depend on their paychecks, are likely to remain insecure about where the economy is headed. This in turn has the potential to constrain consumption growth, limiting the boost that the economy will get from the recent tax cut, and delaying the arrival of a truly self-sustaining recovery.

This could mean that the labor market is another area coming on line in the nation's recovery.

This doesn't look like a significantly different report than we've gotten in past months, but that's significant in itself. The labor market is clearly stuck in neutral.

A lot of economic indicators are up. But there are a lot of people in the economy who are still down.

American companies really haven't been sinking much of their gains back into domestic investment.

There were close to 200,000 jobs cut in the past couple of months, making them the worst two months of last year. The jobless recovery is not only lingering, it's deepening.

This is what a healthy job market looks like ? we just haven't seen it for a long while, so it makes inflation hawks nervous.

This is very much the type of job report you would expect coming off a strong quarter.

As jobs become more available, people are no longer finding themselves stuck as long in unemployment.

It's one thing to run faster in place when the rest of the economy is stagnating as well. But it cuts a little deeper when policymakers are telling you the economy is fine, and you are falling behind.

It looks to me like employers are finally either facing or expecting a level of demand that's much more convincing to them, ... This is yet another piece of evidence that employers are shedding their excessively cautious ways.

It's a pretty classic story of an economy that's leaving middle-income households behind. The gap between how this economy's doing and the living standards of the median family has never been larger.

It's unprecedented. There is a large and growing gap between how the economy is performing and the living standards of the people stoking the engine.

It's too soon to call this a 'jobless' recovery, ... but another quarter or two of these types of reports, and that probably will be a relevant title.

These numbers reveal a labor market that's not bouncing back quickly enough to absorb new entrants along with the people laid off during the downturn.

These top line numbers suggest we are into what's beginning to look like a jobless recovery. We simply can't drive unemployment down if we're only adding 30 or 40,000 jobs. So, basically, we're looking at a situation where the recovery is calling, but the labor market isn't really picking up the phone.

The consumer's been doing a fine job, but we can't keep tapping them and expect them to get us out of a jobless recovery. That's why lots of people on both sides of the aisle are asking for fiscal stimulus.

I'm definitely ready to believe that the rate of job loss has slowed and that soon we will be adding jobs. The question is, will we be adding enough to keep unemployment from rising?

I'm more optimistic than I was a month and a half ago,

Inequality is growing in all parts of the country.

In a strong economy, hours and output can both grow, so long as output grows at a faster rate, thus resulting in productivity growth. But... productivity can also grow in a slowdown or recession, when a decline in hours outpaces weak or nonexistent output growth.

I'm not sure this report convinces us that a recovery is underway in the labor market in any big way.

In the absence of immigrant labor, wages might be a bit higher, particularly in sectors that hire lots of low-skilled labor, which could potentially show up as slightly higher prices.

If you're a native high school dropout in this economy, you've got a slew of problems of which immigrant competition is but one, and a lesser one at that.

Clearly, Katrina hasn't shown up in the jobless claims yet, but it will, ... Next month, we're going to be looking at one of the largest one month negative spikes in the history of this series, going back to the '30s.

Home appreciation was offset by lousy wage growth and debt accumulation.

I don't see many firms that are that cash-constrained; they're customer-constrained.

However, a far larger gap exists when we compare net worth: minorities' net worth was about 27 percent of whites, about half the size of the income ratio.

The inflation bar is very high right now, ... doesn't get you over.

The economy's doing fine, except if you figure in working families. We're posting great numbers in aggregate demand, yet the lousiest on record for wage growth.

The economy's doing fine, except if you figure in working families, ... We're posting great numbers in aggregate demand, yet the lousiest on record for wage growth.

The economy looks pretty snappy from 30,000 feet, but when you get down and look at how actual working families are doing, they're falling behind year after year.

The main reason for that appears to be the fact that the job market has yet to generate the kind of increases in living standards you'd expect at this point.

The job market is slowly tightening. We are wringing out the slack. But we're only six months into a process that could take a year and a half.

The jobless recovery remains with us, and the job machine is stuck in neutral at this point.