The nation’s employers produced a net gain of 115,000 positions, after adding 154,000 in March, the Labor Department said Friday. April’s job growth was less than economists had been predicting.
Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee,immediately seized on the numbers, arguing that the lackluster report demonstrated that President Obama’s stewardship over the economy was lacking. “We should be seeing numbers in the 500,000 jobs created per month,” he said. “This is way, way, way off from what should happen in a normal recovery.”
The White House accentuated the positive in the report, while acknowledging that it fell short of what was needed. “Today’s employment report provides further evidence that the economy is continuing to heal from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression,” said Alan B. Krueger, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, “but much more remains to be done to repair the damage caused by the financial crisis and the deep recession.”
