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The nation’s unemployment rate remains steady at 9.5 percent for the month of July despite a gain of 71,000 jobs in the private sector. Analysts chalk it up in part to a loss of 131,000 temporary jobs, and now many are wondering if unemployment rates in the U.S. will remain stagnant for the next decade.

We’re analyzing coverage from Fox News, NPR, MarketWatch and CNN.



Recent figures confirm the U.S. economy slowed in the spring, and then came to a stall in the summer since employers failed to add as many jobs as anticipated. On Fox News Stuart Varney says unemployment numbers should be nowhere near this high.

“I cannot remember a time when you had 6.6 million people out of a job for more than six months. That is long-term, mass unemployment. Now that rate you just showed, 9.5 percent, that should be a lot lower at this stage of the ‘so-called’ economic recovery. We went into recession in December of ‘07, two and a half years later we should have an unemployment rate way below nine and a half percent.” 



But NPR’s Yuki Noguchi says it’s easier said than done, and points to a major problem in the jobs market.

“Earlier in the year Gault predicted private sector hiring would have accelerated by now but the economy hit a snag and now he expects it might be a few more months before business hire more than a 100,000 people a month. ... The further we go into the year the better the numbers should get on the private side.”

But in an article for MarketWatch, a progressive policy analyst warns it could have been worse.

“To be sure, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act saved or created up to 1.2 million to 2.8 million jobs, and without it, we would have had 8.7 million to 10.3 million jobs lost... the evidence is clear that these policies certainly helped. But we still have work to do.”


Finally on CNN one analyst highlights another problem she says is contributing to slow job growth.



“We’re seeing a trend. Employers are also bringing back temporary or contract workers instead of taking on full-time workers that they’d have to pay benefits to. Experts are saying that in the next few years forty percent of the workforce could be made up of freelancers, because Kyra you know there’s a lot of uncertainty as to what’s going to happen with health care especially, so you know companies are less willing to hire people on full-time.”



So what do you think? Is the economy at a halt, or will job growth pick up in the near future?