Max Baucus: “While the Senate went off this bill and considered the budget just a week ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released…”

“While the Senate went off this bill and considered the budget just a week ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released new job figures for February. Those data show 8.2 million people are still unemployed. That is more than 2 million more than at the beginning of the recession in March 2001. Job growth remains too slow. As this chart shows, we have lost more than 3 million private sector jobs since December 2000, and job creation has not turned around. This next chart shows jobs lost--2.2 million jobs lost; overall total employment, 3 million jobs lost from January 2001 to February 2004; 3 million lost in the private sector during that same period. It was almost 3 million, 2.8 million lost in the manufacturing sector. The economy created just 20,000 new jobs in February. The private sector created no new jobs last month. All the net new jobs came from the Government. Let me repeat that. There were no new private sector jobs created last month. Yet there were 20,000 new jobs overall, and all those jobs were Government jobs.”