The March jobs report has come in very mediocre.
It'd be nice to blame the sequester (the automatic spending cuts that started in March) but it doesn't even appear to be about that.
A series of tweets from WaPo's Zachary Goldfarb points out that this really more likely to be about the expiry of the Payroll Tax Holiday (as the job losses fell in the retail sector) rather than the sequester (seeing as there was not a big decline in professional services).
This jobs report is more a story of the impact of the payroll tax hike than the sequester.
— Zachary A. Goldfarb (@Goldfarb) April 5, 2013
So while retail fell 24K, that was not the case with professionals services.
Professional and business services, which includes lots of gov't contractors, was +51k jobs, well within its recent range.
— Neil Irwin (@Neil_Irwin) April 5, 2013
When/if the sequester bites, then that's yet another area for a let down.