Reuters Blames Poor Job Data on "Austerity"

Reuters has always had a hard left stance and it constantly leaks over to their supposedly straight news coverage but today takes the prize for straight bullshit:

(Reuters) - American employers hired at the slowest pace in nine months in March, a sign that Washington's austerity drive could be stealing momentum from the economy. 

 And what austerity would Reuters be speaking of? The sequester that Obama approved and signed into law? Or perhaps they think that a new stimulus whereby we throw another trillion down the shitter hasn't been passed so Obama is now being austere, That was the subhead BTW and most people really don't read much past there so they got their point out.

The economy added just 88,000 nonfarm jobs last month, the Labor Department said on Friday, well below market expectations for a 200,000 increase. The jobless rate ticked a tenth of a point lower to 7.6 percent largely due to people dropping out of the work force.

This isn't new, people have been dropping out of the market for four years and BLS has been fudging the numbers on a monthly basis. The real unemployment rate is in double digits.

 Analysts suspected some of the weakness was due to tax hikes enacted in January. While retail sales data had not shown a big impact earlier in the year, retailers cut staff in March by 24,100.

 Ah, now we may be getting to the real reason. It took them a few paragraphs to get there and, of course, they whitewash it a bit. Of course it's the tax increases. The sequester did not nearly have the effect predicted and the media knows that it was a big heaping pile of horseshit that Obama was throwing out there when he said it was.  Note they also used the weasel word "some" so that people wouldn't think it was a majority who agreed it was tax hikes.

If taxes are raised and people have to pay more, they have to cut somewhere else. If you can make do without another employee, you will. It's simple economics to most people but not to the Obamatons nor his lapdogs in the media. They would rather blame it on phantom austerity measures and protect their savior from the criticism he rightly deserves.

It was unclear whether across-the-board federal budget cuts that began in March played a significant role in the weak pace of hiring, although nervousness over the cuts might have made businesses shy about taking on more staff.

 

Some economists cautioned against reading too much into the report.

So it was unclear but they still led with the theory that it was "austerity"? But some economist's cautioned against doing that now, didn't they?

So what does Reuters focus on to get us back up to the dreadful numbers we had last month? More spending:

The slowdown in job growth could make policymakers at the Federal Reserve more confident about continuing a bond-buying stimulus program. Prior advances in the labor market recovery had fueled discussion at the central bank over whether to dial back the purchases, perhaps as soon as this summer.

"The recent discussions about the Fed backing off from its quantitative easing has been premature," said Russell Price, senior economist at Ameriprise Financial Services in Troy, Michigan.

If you want to know what media bias looks like, this is it. Lead with something that makes the GOP look guilty, pretend you're playing it straight by adding a comment or two from those who are against tax and spend policies and then finish the article imploring more of the same that got us into the current mess. 

Reuters is a joke and any pretense they ever had of being unbiased was erased years ago.