A wave of census hiring lifted payrolls by 431,000 in May, but job creation by private companies grew at the slowest pace since the start of the year. The unemployment rate dipped to 9.7 percent as people gave up searching for work.

The Labor Department’s new employment snapshot released Friday suggested that outside of the burst of hiring of temporary census workers by the federal government many private employers are wary of bulking up their work forces.

That indicates the economic recovery may not bring relief fast enough for millions of Americans who are unemployed.

Virtually all the job creation in May came from the hiring of 411,000 census workers. Such hiring peaked in May and will begin tailing off in June.

By contrast, hiring by private employers, the backbone of the economy, slowed sharply. They added just 41,000 jobs, down from 218,000 in April and the fewest since January.

The unemployment rate, which is derived from a separate survey than the payroll figures, fell to 9.7 percent from 9.9 percent. The dip partly reflected 322,000 people leaving the labor force for a variety of reasons.

All told, 15 million people were unemployed in May.

Counting people who have given up looking for work and part-timers who would rather be working full time, the “underemployment” rate fell to 16.6 percent in May from 17.1 percent in April. Even with the drop, the high underemployment figure shows how difficult it is for jobseekers to find work.

Employers across a range of industries last month added jobs at a slower pace—or cut them. Factories, professional and business services, leisure and hospitality companies, and education and health care firms all slowed hiring. Financial services, construction companies and retailers all pared jobs. Government, however, led the way in hiring, adding a whopping 390,000 positions last month.

Continue reading here. Keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of those government jobs are temporary.

It’s hard to find a politician who isn’t eager to “do something” about high unemployment. Turns out California has found one way to save and create certain kinds of jobs—spend like mad and raise taxes.

That job-creation strategy has worked quite well for government-sector workers. Problem is the statewide unemployment rate is still among the highest in the nation, and many private-sector employers are heading to states like Texas, where taxes are lower and regulations are lighter.

“I would love to have companies calling me saying, ‘We’d like to move to California, can you help us with that relocation?’ I get none of those calls,” says business relocation coach Joe Vranich. “The calls I do get are, ‘Hello, we want to move out of California, can you help us do that?’”

Vranich says there’s no one reason why businesses leave. He calls it “death by a thousand cuts,” where job creators get fed up with everything from high taxes to traffic gridlock and legal hassles.

Take Rick and Jack Newcombe, the father-son team that runs Creators Syndicate.

A long legal battle with the city of Los Angles might end up being their company’s final cut. The Newcombes say the city arbitrarily stuck the company into a higher tax category and officials are applying the hike retroactively. City officials are demanding $400,000 in back taxes, but Rick Newcombe calls the whole episode “legalized theft,” adding that a tax penalty of that size would force the company to lay off 10 employees.

It’s ironic that such drama unfolds in a city where Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is always doing something—transit projects! green jobs!— he hopes will stimulate the economy. And steep statewide unemployment persists long after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger eagerly accepted billions in federal stimulus funds. In fact, the Bush-Obama scatter shot of bailouts, stimuli, and rescue plans has fallen well short of proponents’ promises.

Want to create and save jobs? Maybe it’s time for politicians to stop doing so much and start undoing some of their worst blunders.

“More Taxes or More Jobs?” is written and produced by Ted Balaker, who also hosts. Camera-Animation: Hawk Jensen; Associate Producer: Paul Detrick; Additional Photography: Alex Manning.

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Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist who’s never seen a government expenditure he didn’t like, Sunday  pointed to a “study” by the Economic Policy Institute, which alleges spending $40 billion over 3 years could create about a million “public-service” jobs.

In other words, Krugman and EPI would see fit to simply create government jobs, instead of trying to help the private sector.  That makes sense, given who supports EPI.

The Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association have kicked in nearly $2 million in their members’ dues dollars over the last couple years to fund EPI’s research, according to financial reports filed with the federal government and found at ACORNcracked.com and AFTexposed.com.

That’s funny, they’re all government employee unions.  And they funded a study calling for government jobs to be created.

And Krugman takes EPI at face value.

What is the bigger lesson here, Krugman’s penchant for being a shill for proponents of bigger government or EPI producing “research” that will benefit its funders?  Both are an unpleasant reality for them.

If the Obama administration and liberals in general were interested in actually helping the economy, they would promote solutions based on free-market principles.  Instead, growing government is their solution to the problem.

Isn’t it telling that both SEIU and AFT attended the Obama jobs summit, according to Fox News.

But back to Krugman.  He admits creating a million government jobs would have consequences:

All of this would cost money, probably several hundred billion dollars, and raise the budget deficit in the short run. But this has to be weighed against the high cost of inaction in the face of a social and economic emergency.

But as White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”  And sadly, the solution is invariably bigger government.

However, the website is troubled with inaccuracies, and these problems are undermining its credibility. Wisconsin Democrat Rep. Dave Obey agrees: “The inaccuracies on recovery.gov that have come to light are outrageous and the Administration owes itself, the Congress, and every American a commitment to work night and day to correct the ludicrous mistakes.”

Given that stimulus award recipients are responsible for providing much of the information you see on Recovery.gov, it’s reasonable to expect some errors in the reporting process. Alas, some of the information seems to come out of thin air.

Phantom Congressional Districts.

Picking up on a story from ABC News about stimulus jobs created in phantom congressional districts, I found jobs/awards reported for the following Illinois “districts”: 0, 20th, 21st, 22nd, 28th, 33rd, 34th, 42nd, 44th, 53rd, and 59th. Or as Stephen Colbert would say, “the fightin’ 59th.” Too bad Colbert couldn’t “better know these districts,” because they don’t exist. Notes the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “the federal government is attributing about $6.5 million in stimulus spending to non-existent congressional districts in Illinois.”

Counting Irregularities.

Recovery.gov touts state-by-state totals for jobs “created or saved.” Some of the counts are little more than guesses. For example, the Illinois Institute of Technology was awarded $97,900 to “purchase a high performance computer cluster” and related software. One job was counted created/saved; the related entry surmised: “I think the vendor of the computer equipment can retain about one job for this amount of purchase.” That’s totally unsubstantiated. Still, it was added to Illinois’s statewide jobs tally.

For some projects, the descriptive “job creation” information does not match the numerical “number of jobs” entry. One entry for Head Start in Illinois noted they would use $169,279 to “hire 2 additional staff and increase compensation of staff through a COLA to improve overall quality of program.” Yet under “number of jobs” they listed 63.65 positions, which counted toward the statewide jobs total.

Misallocation of Job Counts.

Recovery.gov breaks down the jobs created/saved by the stimulus by congressional district. For Illinois, the vast majority of jobs were supposedly created/saved in the 18th congressional district. With 16,996 jobs created/saved in the 18th district (the next largest jobs total is 3,444 in the 7th district). A closer look at the details shows that 14,233 of those central Illinois jobs came from the Illinois State Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, which is located in state capital of Springfield. The State Office counted education jobs saved across the state, yet all were allocated to the 18th district. If the designers of Recovery.gov hope to sway future congressional votes with the district-by-district job numbers, they’re need to present credible information.

Where are the Private Sector Jobs?

You’ll remember that back in January 2009 President Barack Obama promised that 90 percent of the jobs saved or created by the stimulus would be in the private sector. So far, that’s not the case. If the 90 percent promise held up, 22,003 of the 24,448 Illinois jobs would be in the private sector. But looking at the data, the big job saver is a government entity, otherwise known as “Illinois, State of.” Some 14,233 jobs were saved in public education. The “Chicago Transit Authority” is another big job saver and/or creator, accounting for 2,071 jobs. Seen in this light, the stimulus was more of a state and local government bailout than a private-sector engine starter.

But are these state government numbers even trustworthy? The Chicago Tribune’s Watchdog took a closer look at the education job claims, and they found that “those statistics, compiled initially by the Illinois State Board of Education, appear riddled with anomalies that raise questions about their validity.” Some schools were credited with saving more jobs than are on payroll. Authorities are now revising the numbers.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m a big fan of government spending transparency at the federal, state, and local level. Then-Senator Barack Obama deserves props for working with Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn (R) to pass federal transparency legislation into law in 2006. Even so, the Obama Administration needs to do a better job of getting the numbers right if they don’t want to damage the nascent concept of government transparency.

The White House claims that 640,329 were created or saved. That, by the way, is way less than what Christina Romer claimed would be created. Last week, she mentioned 1.4 million during a Joint Committee hearing. Remember.

First, $159 billion has been spent so far. That’s $248,273 per job.

However, when you look at some specific contracts that were awarded you find that some jobs were created or saved at an insane cost to taxpayers. For instance, $1,359,633,501 were awarded to CH2M WG IDAHO LLC, in WA to create 2,183 jobs. That’s $622,827 per job. That’s not as bad though as the  $258,646,800 awarded to the Brookhaven Science Associates, LLC in NY, to create 25 jobs. That’s over $10.3 million per job.

I would be happy with one of these jobs.

Second, while the administration is promising good and in time reporting, we can see that it’s far from being the case. Agencies report having spent $207.3Billion and yet only $36,688,660,161 were reported by states. That’s a big gap, isn’t it?

Third, some 85 percent of the money went to 4 agencies: HHS, Labor, Education and Social Security. That money wasn’t spent on shovel ready projects. For instance, some of the HHS funds went to some rural high school and college students from Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee to conduct medical research this summer with a team of leading scientists at Vanderbilt University. The Department of Labor spent $11,058,877 in unemployment insurance (UI) modernization incentive funds to the state of West Virginia. And the Department of Education is mainly spending its money to keep union protected school teachers in their jobs. Not really shovel ready projects, are they?

But the most relevant information on Recovery.gov is that most of the jobs created or saved are in the public sector. For instance, according to Vice President Biden, out of the 640,329 jobs, 325,000 went to education and 80,000 to construction jobs. The difference we will soon find out is going to other government jobs.

You need more evidence? 13,080 grants went to the private sector, and 116,625 went to feral agencies.

So even if we assume that the government could create jobs by spending our money, we can see that what this money is being spent on is big government. Or bigger government I should say.

So when you think that, on top of everything, the  government can’t create jobs (here and here), this data is transparently depressing.