UNC-CH failing athletes and taxpayers

Just when you think you've dug out the last of the academic and moral rot at North Carolina's "flagship" university, another chunk of the school's reputation crumbles.

CNN reports on the woeful literacy skills and achievement of athletes in public universities

A CNN investigation found public universities across the country where many students in the basketball and football programs could read only up to an eighth-grade level. The data obtained through open records requests also showed a staggering achievement gap between college athletes and their peers at the same institution.

and illustrates its case with UNC Chapel Hill.

As a graduate student at UNC-Greensboro, (Mary) Willingham researched the reading levels of 183 UNC-Chapel Hill athletes who played football or basketball from 2004 to 2012. She found that 60% read between fourth- and eighth-grade levels. Between 8% and 10% read below a third-grade level.

Willingham is certainly an impeachable source, having contributed to the cheating scandal at UNC-CH. However, even if only a portion of what she has reported is true, she casts quite an indictment against the school and its athletic programs.

And as the CNN story makes clear, UNC-CH has a lot of company.

Nevertheless, UNC-CH's admissions practices do a shameful disservice to the affected athletes. It's one thing to open the doors of opportunity as wide as possible. It's quite another to use the unpaid services of students whose limited reading and writing skills give them almost no chance of succeeding academically.

The practices are also a disservice to the state's taxpayers, who subsidize each athlete to the tune of thousands of dollars per year. Yes, boosters fund scholarships for the athletes, but those scholarships cover only a portion of the cost of attending the university. NC taxpayers kick in the rest.

Regrettably, UNC-CH will likely continue to do whatever skeevy things it is going to do. Students and alumni should be outraged that the value of their degrees are being tarnished, but they seem too busy trying to snatch up football and basketball tickets to notice.

While the school, the athletes, the students, and the alumni are content with this, there are no reasons why it has to be underwritten by taxpayers.

The UNC system, consisting of UNC-CH and its 16 sister schools, has minimum admission requirements that involve specified high school coursework (e.g., four years of English courses and two years of another language), minimum GPAs, and minimum test scores. The state should eliminate funding for all athletic scholarship students who fail to meet these requirements.

Better yet, UNC-CH should re-dedicate itself to its educational mission.

Suffer the children

It's hard to be hopeful about the future when you see these stories of how children are used and abused.

CNN reports about a 10-year-old Afghan girl who was coerced into acting as a suicide bomber.

And here in the USA, CNN also reports on a two-year-old who is being groomed to be a thug.

Gov. McCrory Targets the poor

Gov. Pat McCrory promised he would run North Carolina's state government more like a business. It's just too bad that the business he picked was Target.

WRAL reports

A computer programming error led to almost 49,000 children statewide receiving someone else's Medicaid card last week, the state Department of Health and Human Services said Monday.

... DHHS has notified the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services of the breach of federal health care privacy regulations and will formally notify affected individuals, Terrell said. People also will receive statements of health care services provided using their Medicaid ID number so they can know whether the number has been misused, she said.

The huge violation of privacy follows a familiar and disturbing pattern for the McCrory administration.

As with several of the administration's other blunders, including the disastrous roll-out of food stamp eligibility software which delayed processing of much needed food assistance and flooded the state's food banks and its changes to the state Unemployment Insurance system which cost long-term unemployed North Carolinians their federal extended joblessness benefits, the latest foul-up harms the state's most disadvantaged and vulnerable citizens.

In another part of the pattern, the Governor weaselly cast blame on everyone but his own administration. This time he blamed the prior administrations, even though his hand-picked administrator has been responsible for the administration for nearly a year, and even President Obama.

Conservative social policy emphasizes personal responsibility, at least for the poor. It's long past time for Gov. McCrory to take responsibility for his own administration and his own mistreatment of the poor.

Not exactly data-driven people

Quote of the day: "Among some of the most critical Republicans, let me say politely that they are not exactly data-driven people--” Jared Bernstein, commenting on Republicans' unfailingly failed predictions regarding the effects of Fed stimulus policies.

Politico has more

Republicans will use the expected vote this month on the nomination of Janet Yellen to chair the Federal Reserve as one more chance to slam the Fed’s easy money policies.

But there’s one big rub to their argument: Their predictions about the impact of these policies since they first began in late 2008 have been wrong so far.

Inflation has not spiked, and the value of the dollar has not collapsed. At this point, in fact, there are more worries about deflation than inflation.

But thanks to the tea party influence in the GOP — in particular the Fed-bashing Rand and Ron Paul wing of the party — ripping the Fed and the bigger role it is playing in the economy has become more a litmus test for party loyalty, regardless of whether the dire predictions have come true.

It's hard to tell with this crowd whether they're kooks, pandering to kooks, or both. Either way, their policy prescription--restricting the money supply--would be disastrous.

Naturally, this is the same crowd that believes that extended unemployment benefits are a "disservice" to the unemployed and that defaulting on the debt is a worthwhile colonic for the economy.

Failing NC's children

Republican-led budget slashing is crippling North Carolina's public schools and setting the stage for an entire generation to fail.

WRAL reports

Almost 17,200 additional students packed into North Carolina schools this year while the number of teachers dropped, according to new payroll data, leading to what some say are larger class sizes that inhibit learning.

The article goes on to point out that the total number of public school teachers fell by 60. The losses would have been about 10 times that level if local school districts hadn't paid for replacement teachers out of their own funds. Overall, the number of state-funded teachers fell by 589.

Not only have teacher positions been cut, but the legislature has allowed the rising cost-of-living to erode teacher salaries. Just a few years ago, NC teacher salaries were near the average for the country. Now, average salaries are lower than almost every state.

The predictable result is that more teachers are racing for the exits. The WRAL article indicates that about one out of every seven NC teachers left their jobs last year, which was up from an already high one out of nine leaving two years ago. The losses include high proportions of experienced teachers. Many of the teachers are taking jobs in other states.

More students, fewer teachers, worse-paid and more dissatisfied teachers, less-experienced teachers, and cuts in other resources--they're all ingredients for educational failure.

Children get one shot at an effective education, and NC legislators are dooming this generation. Is it any wonder why Republicans are scrambling to dismantle student testing and standards? No sense documenting your own failure.

Nullification all in a twist

As if we needed more evidence that congressional Republicans lack any agenda or principles whatsoever except opposing the President, The Hill reports that they may now sue to enforce all of the temporarily suspended parts of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Republican lawmakers bashed the Obama administration at a House Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday for opting not to enforce core parts of the Affordable Care Act, such as minimum requirements for individual healthcare plans.

Rep. Trent Franks (Ariz.), the chairman of the Judiciary panel’s Constitution and Civil Justice subcommittee, said Congress should sue the administration to spur Obama to enforce the healthcare law as written.

This would be the same ACA that Republicans aver to oppose stem to stern. The same ACA that House Republicans have voted nearly four dozen times to repeal in its entirety. The same ACA that they describe as a job-killer. The same ACA that they shut down the government to, well, suspend.

Now they propose suing to enforce it in its entirety.

As former President Bill Clinton quipped last year, that takes some brass.

Gun claims the life of another NC preschooler

Guns do kill people.

Just a few weeks after a NC two-year-old was killed while handling an unattended gun, another small child has died. wral.com reports

A 4-year-old child died early Saturday after accidentally shooting himself inside a home in west Fayetteville home, police said.

...According to investigators, the boy found the loaded gun on top of the refrigerator before accidentally shooting himself. Emergency crews attempted to treat him, but he was pronounced dead at the home.

Tragic, sad, and unnecessary.

Lesson learned?

You would think that after nominating a host of too-extreme-for-prime-time candidates that failed to knock off vulnerable, "damaged-goods" Democrats, including Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Claire McCaskill, and now Va. Gov.-Elect Terry McAuliffe, Republicans would wise up.

You would be wrong. National Review's Maggie Gallagher explains

Would another $3 million have swung 50,000 votes? The Republicans, starting with Bill Bolling, who undercut Cuccinelli as unelectable have egg all over their faces.

This was a winnable election. How did we give this away to Terry McAuliffe? Some serious soul-searching should be taking place among the anti-tea-party faction.

The implied prescription--doubling down on bad Tea Party bets--is music to Democrats' ears.

11-year-old with 400 rounds of ammo

More evidence that the U.S. has more guns than it can responsibly handle. CNN reports

A Washington state middle school boy was arrested Wednesday and faces an attempted murder charge, after he brought 400 rounds of ammunition, multiple knives and a handgun to his school, police said.

The 11-year-old was booked into a juvenile detention facility after the incident that caused the lockdown of Frontier Middle School, Vancouver Police said.

The NRA should be along any moment now to tell us that the only thing that stops a bad 11-year-old with a gun is a good 11-year-old with a gun.

Irresponsible gun ownership

This week's news featured a trio of stories of irresponsible gun ownership that so far have led to the deaths of two children and one adult and the woundings of two other children. The words "so far" have to be emphasized because the gun from one of the incidents is still out in the community and because the week is only half over.

On Saturday, a two-year-old in North Carolina died after finding her father's loaded semi-automatic pistol. Besides being irresponsibly stored, the gun was irresponsibly provided to the father, a convicted teenage felon.

On Monday, a Nevada 12-year-old child killed a teacher, wounded two other middle-school students, and shot himself after taking a semi-automatic pistol from his parents' home.

And still later this week, we discovered that an AR-15 rifle was stolen from the home of NC Rep. Renee Ellmers after her family left it and other gear "out in plain sight" in an unlocked garage. To make it easier for thieves, the Congresswoman's teenage son had earlier advertised the availability of the gun in a tweet. Heaven knows where or how the stolen weapon will be used.

Rep. Ellmers' spokesperson expressed the Congresswoman's concerns, "As you can imagine, the Ellmers family is shaken by these events and is working with law enforcement to make sure those responsible are found and brought to justice."

We already know who was irresponsible, and it's highly doubtful that Congresswoman's community, which is also shaken by the availability of another gun, will see any justice.

Ironically, Rep. Ellmers co-sponsored legislation calling for a special prosecutor to investigate gunwalking.

Update (10/23/13, 2:30 p.m.): The week's tragic toll includes the death of a third child. CNN reports

A woman who was babysitting a 5-year-old who fatally shot himself Monday with her gun has been charged with abandoning or endangering a child, a felony, and jailed in Orange County, Texas, police said Wednesday.

"Good fight?" Good grief

In the end, the Republicans accomplished nothing, and to hear House Speaker John Boehner describe it, the Republicans learned even less.

In a radio interview yesterday following his and his party's capitulation on their latest extortion attempt, Speaker Boehner said that he was "doing good" because "we fought the good fight; we just didn't win."

Give him credit for recognizing orange-tinted failure when he looks in the mirror. The "good fight" part, however, is delusional.

While Speaker Boehner's "good fight" accomplished nothing, it cost Americans a whole bunch.

The needless government shutdown hurt the economy. Bloomberg reports

Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services yesterday said the shutdown has shaved at least 0.6 percent off of fourth-quarter 2013 gross domestic product growth, or taken $24 billion out of the economy.

IHS Inc. of Lexington, Massachusetts, reduced its fourth-quarter GDP growth estimate to 1.6 percent, from 2.2 percent in September.

That $24 billion works out to about $200 per American household.

And that's not all, the latest damage to the economy can be added to the costs from previous extortion efforts.

Macroeconomic Advisers LLC said in a report prepared this week for the Peter G. Peterson Foundation that the recurring budget battles in Washington have lowered U.S. economic growth by about 0.3 percentage points a year since 2009. It has also added more than a half-point to this year’s unemployment rate, or the equivalent of about 900,000 jobs, the report said.

Republicans' extortion strategy and default nihilism are also damaging America's credit rating and will increase our borrowing costs going forward. Their "good fight" is the gift that keeps on giving.

The shutdown was also wasteful. Although the furloughed government employees will be repaid and made whole, taxpayers won't be compensated for the work that couldn't be performed while the workers were idled (as well as the needless work that was required to prepare contingencies for the shutdown). The GOP rails against waste and abuse yet singlehandedly caused billions in foregone government production.

Worse, the Speaker has promised that "the fight will continue."

Games but not so much fun with Speaker Boehner

Referring to the government shutdown that he caused, House Speaker John Boehner petulantly cried, "This isn't some damn game"--an odd statment given all of the games that Speaker Boehner has played leading up to and during the shutdown.

Here are just a few of the games.

Games with the shutdown. The first and biggest game was loading a temporary, short-term continuing resolution for spending with a poison-pill amendment to defund the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This only 11 months after promising that he would stop with these games.

Asked whether he will make another attempt to fully repeal the Affordable Care Act, Boehner said "the election changes that" and "Obamacare is the law of the land."

Games with lawmaker subsidies. After the Senate approved the continuing resolution but rejected the defunding amendment (and another delaying the ACA), Speaker Boehner insisted on including an amendment that removed an "exemption" that would have provided subsidies to Senators, Representatives, and their staffs to help cover the costs of mandated health insurance.

However, as Politico reports, Speaker Boehner had earlier worked to provide the same subsidies.

Yet behind-the-scenes, Boehner and his aides worked for months with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), and others, to save these very same, long-standing subsidies, according to documents and e-mails provided to POLITICO.

Games with the conference committee. When Speaker Boehner lost that game, he next moved a resolution with an amendment calling for a conference committee to "negotiate" the terms of the House's extortion.

However, over the previous seven months, Speaker Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell rejected 18 requests for conference committees for the Senate-passed budget.

Games with piecemeal legislation. When that gambit also failed, Speaker Boehner moved on to a new game. Instead of his original ploy of passing a single continuing resolution that omitted funding for the ACA, he pushed for a series of piecemeal funding bills. Taken together, these bills would have accomplished exactly what his original legislation proposed--funded what the Tea Party liked but dropped the funding for the ACA and other things that it didn't.

Games with an up-or-down vote. And Speaker Boehner continues to block the House from voting up-or-down vote on any of the versions of the continuing resolution that the Senate has passed, saying "That's not going to happen." A so-called "clean" continuing resolution appears to enjoy the support of a majority of House members, not to mention a majority of Americans and plurality of Republicans.

Sadly, the Speaker's games have had real consequences for the 800,000 idled federal workers, for citizens who depend on or enjoy government services, and for the economy as a whole.

As my parents used to say, "it's all fun and games until someone gets hurt."

The country is hurting, Mr. Speaker, and it's long past time to end your games.

Update (10-4-13, 4:25 p.m.): More games: Roll Call retrieves a previous Republican plan from the memory hole.

Senior Republicans were for “clean” CRs before they were against them.

Conservative Republicans have been pushing “automatic” continuing resolutions going back at least to the 1995-96 government shutdown era. The idea was popular on the right because an automatic freeze of government spending would take a shutdown off the table, lessening the leverage appropriators had to increase spending or include extraneous items.

No jobs from the new coliseum contract?

What strange alchemy at the Greensboro Coliseum Complex.

The News and Record and other sources have reported that Wake Forest University, the owner of the Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum and several other venues in nearby Winston-Salem, has contracted with Matt Brown's Greensboro Coliseum Complex to run events at its venues.

Greensboro Coliseum Director Matt Brown’s empire is spreading across the county line.

Wake Forest University has hired the coliseum’s staff to book and manage events at Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum and three other athletics venues here.

The university will pay Greensboro $115,000 a year for the next five years, plus a share of Ticketmaster fees earned from events.

The News and Record article and an editorial tout the many potential benefits from regionalizing the management of the major venues in Greensboro and Winston-Salem--most importantly, the ability for the combined operation to compete more effectively with other major venues in North Carolina and beyond.

It's also a testament to Mr. Brown's and his staff's skills that Wake Forest decided that outsourcing the management of its venues to his shop was more cost-effective than using the university's own staff.

However, a sentence in the second-to-last paragraph of the News and Record story begs some questions.

Greensboro doesn’t plan to hire new staff because of the agreement, said City Manager Denise Turner Roth.

Howzat?

Wake Forest is hiring the Coliseum staff to perform $115,000 worth of services that it wasn't performing before and wouldn't be performing otherwise.

It's alchemy to suggest that these new services don't have any staffing implications.

Without staffing changes, the Coliseum's staff will either make room in their existing work schedules for these services by performing fewer services for the taxpayers of Greensboro, OR the staff currently have a considerable amount do-nothing time that's available for hire.

Greensboro taxpayers should be concerned if its staff will perform fewer services on behalf of the city. Taxpayers should also be concerned if the Coliseum is currently over-staffed and has workers with extra potentially billable time on their hands.

If the current staffing is appropriate, the Coliseum should either add workers or perhaps add hours for some part-time workers. The contract should mean either new jobs or better jobs in Greensboro.

Another possibility is overtime pay for the existing workers, but this seems inefficient, especially given the enormous number of unemployed people in the city.

Is Mr. Brown about to perform alchemy? Or will he find a way to add to Greensboro's job base?

Mr. Speaker are jobs still your "number one priority?"

Speaker of the House, Rep. John Boehner, has repeatedly said that jobs are his "number one priority"--a statement that's hard to square with his and House Republicans' current actions. From Bloomberg

A shutdown of the U.S. government would reduce fourth-quarter economic growth by as much as 1.4 percentage points depending on its length, economists say, as government workers from park rangers to telephone receptionists are furloughed.

Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics Inc. estimates a three-to-four week shutdown would cut growth by 1.4 points. Moody’s projects a 3 percent rate of growth in the fourth quarter without a closure. A two-week shutdown starting Oct. 1 could cut growth by 0.3 percentage point to an annualized 2.3 percent rate, according to St. Louis-based Macroeconomic Advisers LLC.

If the number one priority truly is creating jobs, the economic hostage-taking must end.

Job-killing in Raleigh continues

Chalk up another self-inflicted job wound by Gov. McCrory's administration.

The North Carolina Coastal Federation is reporting that the state's Division of Water Resources has just turned down two federal grants totaling $583,000.

Saying they don’t need the money to meet their new mission, state environmental officials recently turned down almost $600,000 in federal grants. The money would have been used to set up a network of sites to begin testing streams in the Piedmont where natural gas production is likely to occur and to establish a long-term planning and monitoring program to protect wetlands.

One grant would have paid state researchers to collect baseline water quality data in the economically depressed central Piedmont region. The other grant would have paid for public employees to plan for and monitor the protection of wetlands.

The grants would have provided valuable outputs, especially given the possibility of natural gas fracking in the central Piedmont and the need to protect sources of water flowing into Jordan Lake. Both grants would have supported the goals of advancing economic development while simultaneously improving the environment.

More prosaically however, both grants would have funded well-paying jobs in a state that needs every job it can get its hands on.

The decisions are also wasteful given that valuable state resources went into the effort to apply for the grants.

But nevermind those considerations. The general economic interest of the state is no match for the narrow special business and political interests of the Governor.

It's little wonder that North Carolina trails the nation in job growth.

Another jobless month in North Carolina

Another month, another no-growth jobs report for North Carolina. On Friday, the U.S. Department of Labor reported that the state lost 1,700 non-farm jobs on a seasonally-adjusted basis in August.

While the state added 5,100 private sector jobs, it shed 6,800 public sector jobs (Dr. Aldona Wos' efforts to employ under-qualified McCronies notwithstanding). Since January, North Carolina has lost 12,600 public sector jobs. The current number of public sector jobs is the lowest its been since June 2007.

The Department of Labor estimated that 8,700 fewer North Carolinians were unemployed on a seasonally-adjusted basis in August than July. However, the drop off occurred because just over 12,000 fewer North Carolinians were in the labor force.

Gov. McCrory's approval ratings have taken a similar dip. Maybe it's because there are so many more idled North Carolinians available to take pollsters' calls.

Our failing public charter schools

A struggling charter school in Kinston, NC fails spectacularly and leaves taxpayers, students, teachers, and two local school systems holding the bag. NC PolicyWatch reports

State education officials want to know what happened to more than $600,000 in public education funding a Kinston charter school spent this school year despite only holding classes for 10 days.

Kinston Charter Academy, which opened in 2004 with the goal of educating low-income children in and around Lenoir County, voluntarily shut its door on Sept. 6, a few days into the new school year. The state Board of Education had been poised to try and close the charter school after hearing numerous complaints about financial instabilities at the school.

The sudden closure, two weeks into the school year, left the families of the 230 students in the K-8 school only a few days to enroll in nearby public schools in Lenoir and Pitt counties.

But it also brought up questions about what the school did with the $666,818 state education funding it received in July that was supposed to last through October. The school was also overfunded, receiving money to educate 366 students when only 230 students enrolled.

Two-thirds of a million state tax dollars to provide almost no education, while throwing numerous students back onto the local school systems at the last minute.

Where's the accountability?

Misplaced concerns

Reflecting their deep and genuine concern about women's health, South Carolina legislators in recent years have enacted a host of regulations to increase the "safety" of abortions, including requirements that only licensed obstetrician/gynecologists be allowed to perform abortions after the first trimester and that only licensed physicians be allowed to prescribe medication to induce abortions.

Terminating a pregnancy carries some health risks, but completing a pregnancy and delivering a child have much, much higher risks (U.S. women are almost 15 times more likely to die in childbirth than to die from an abortion). Given those relative risks, you would think that the concerned legislators in South Carolina would also require that OB/Gyns be present at delivery.

They don't, and sometimes the results are tragic.

Greensboro's little white school houses

The charter school movement in North Carolina is intended to provide educators with flexibility to innovate and to open doors for all children to learn. However, many charter schools use this flexibility to subtly keep some children from finding those doors.

In Greensboro, this has led to one publicly-funded charter school--Greensboro Academy--being the whitest public school in all of Greensboro. Figures from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction indicate that in the 2012-13 school year, 81.7 percent of Greensboro Academy's students were white. By way of contrast, just under 38 percent of public school students in Guilford County are white. Greensboro Academy's current composition represents progress of a sort; a few years ago just over 90 percent of its students were white.

Another publicly-funded charter school--Cornerstone Academy--isn't far behind with 74.0 percent of its students being white, essentially double the proportion of white students in Guilford County's public schools.

How do these publicly-funded schools achieve these remarkable numbers? The biggest factor is location. Public schools, including both charter and district schools, draw largely from their surrounding neighborhoods. Patterns of racial segregation in housing are reflected in racial segregation in school composition.

Greensboro Academy and Cornerstone Academy are both located near the northwest fringes of Greensboro (they're less than four miles driving distance apart), a section of the city that is predominantly white. For example, the district elementary school for children who live very near Greensboro Academy is Claxton Elementary, which is 59.7 percent white, and the district middle school is Kernodle, which is 64.5 percent white.

However, these locational choices are compounded by another factor--the lack of general school bus transportation to the schools. Parents at these schools are responsible for transporting or arranging transportation for their children. This makes it much harder for low-income parents, especially those who lack cars. The schools assist parents who want to locate car-pool partners, but this would still be a substantial barrier for those without cars in the first place. Additionally, neither school is especially walkable.

Charter schools are allocated a share of the state and local transportation funds, but part of their academic "flexibility" includes being able to use those funds for other purposes.

Put the schools' location and transportation barriers together and you have a dandy recipe for racial exclusion--all on the public dime.

Another publicly-funded charter school--Summerfield Charter Academy, the Howard Coble Campus--has just opened a few miles further out in this "underserved" area. Look for it to generate even more skewed demographics.

Americans participating in the labor force like it's 1978

The U.S. Department of Labor reported this morning that the national unemployment rate fell from an estimated 7.4 percent in July to 7.3 percent in August, on a seasonally adjusted basis. At first blush, a falling unemployment rate looks like good news, but upon closer examination, the supporting survey data suggest that the labor market actually weakened in August.

The unemployment rate is calculated from a large, national, monthly survey of approximately 60,000 households. Among other things, the survey asks whether adult members of the households were participating in the labor force (meaning they were either working or available and looking for work) and whether they were employed. The unemployment rate is calculated as the ratio of people who are in the labor force but not working (the numerator) and all people who are in the labor force (the denominator).

By these definitions, the August survey indicates that nearly 200,000 fewer Americans are unemployed, which should be very good news--except that all of this decline (and then some) came from a reduction in the labor force. Overall, the government estimated that the number of Americans in the labor force fell by just over 300,000, and the number of Americans who reported that they were working fell by just over 100,000.

The percentage of non-institutionalized, adult civilians who were in the labor force fell from 63.4 percent in July to 63.2 percent in August, the lowest that figure has been since 1978. The percentage of non-institutionalized, adult, civilians who were working fell from 58.7 percent in July to 58.6 percent in August. That number is little changed since the depths of the Great Recession (the rate bottomed out at 58.2 percent in 2010).

Some of the change seems likely to be sampling error. The Department of Labor cautions that monthly changes in the survey estimates that are smaller than 400,000 aren't statistically meaningful. Thus, we can't rule out the possibility that the numbers of people in the labor force and who are employed actually grew. Indeed, preliminary estimates from the establishment survey, which counts jobs at firms rather than counts of people who report employment, indicate that the number of non-farm jobs grew by 169,000 on a seasonally adjusted basis (plus or minus 100,000 given the sampling error).

Nevertheless, we can conclude with certainty that jobs aren't being added quickly enough to make meaningful improvements in the economic lives of Americans. That's disappointing and sadly, not news.