BLS April 2013 jobs report -- what others won't tell you.

BLS released April's jobs data, and wouldn't you know it, as I said last month, there would be upward revisions, and boy they are huge.  If you did nothing but paid attention to the frontline estimate, you would have under-counted  96,000 jobs in February.

	1st estimate	2nd estimate	3rd estimate
02/2013	236	268	332
03/2013	88	138
04/2013	165

There were 165,000 new jobs in April and the unemployment rate dropped from 7.6% to 7.5%.  Meanwhile, even though the slowed job growth in March wasn't as bad as initially reported, it seems entirely plausible that what we're seeing is a big drag on GDP from federal spending cuts which affect the private sector, namely defense contractors.  The concern of course, is that this will trickle down throughout those geographic areas affected.  Another concern is the sequester cuts on poverty-related programs, which may lead to an increase in private debt leveraging.

Many people believe that size of federal government is growing.  This is patently untrue, and has been for some time now.  The continued reduction of the federal workforce in absolute numbers and as a share of total non-farm jobs, has continued for years.  Aside from the one-time bump of Census workers, we've seen a 3% reduction in the federal workforce since January 2010.  No Republican has actually told you this, now have they?

Cutting 3% of the federal workforce has been a drag on the economy gaining stream, leaving many Americans stuck in long-term unemployment or leaving the workforce altogether.  If these cuts were to have occurred when the economy was already strong, those laid off federal workers would have a much easier time finding jobs in the private sector, while adding competition to the private sector when it needed it most to keep inflation low.  Instead, we have a drag on a slow recovery and very low inflation.