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Companies Add 288,000 Jobs to Payrolls
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May 7, 12:38 PM (ET)
By LEIGH STROPE
WASHINGTON (AP) - Employers added 288,000 jobs to their payrolls in April as the nation's unemployment rate slipped to 5.6 percent, reinforcing hopes for a sustained turnaround in the jobs market that had lagged for so long.
Payrolls have risen now for eight straight months, with 867,000 new jobs created so far this year, the Labor Department reported Friday.
"I'm officially declaring the jobless recovery dead," said Ken Mayland, president of ClearView Economics. "I think we are now on a path of what will be substantial job gains."
The strengthening jobs market comes just in time to aid President Bush's re-election efforts, which were in question a few months ago based on his economic record.
"This administration has a positive vision, a hopeful vision" and "now our economy is the fastest growing of any industrialized nation in the world," Bush said in Dubuque, Iowa, to a cheering crowd as he started a daylong bus tour along the Mississippi River.
Bush is on track to be the first president since the Great Depression to have lost jobs under his watch. But the hiring gains in recent months have helped shrink those losses to about 1.5 million. His administration was widely criticized for an overly optimistic forecast that 2.6 million new jobs would be created this year. Economists now say the chugging economy could get close to that mark.
"I don't think these two months of big increases are a flash in pan," Mayland said of April's job growth and the revised increase of 337,000 new jobs in March.
In a second bit of good economic news Friday for Bush, Congress' nonpartisan budget analyst said this year's federal deficit seems on track to be less than the $477 billion it predicted in March. It was the latest indication that the government's short-term fiscal picture may be improving.
But public support for Bush's handling of the economy was at 43 percent early this month, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll. That was the lowest number since Ipsos-Public Affairs began tracking that question in 2002.
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