This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 10th, 2009 on Caleb Brown.

New jobs numbers are not good. The United States trade

imbalances sometimes get part of the blame. Dan Griswalt, director of the

Cato Institute's Center for Trade Policy Studies, an author of the new book

Matt About Trade offers his thoughts.

Well the latest unemployment numbers are not good.

The unemployment rate went up to 9.7%, which is the highest it's been for 25 years. Another

200,000 net jobs were lost. Now some people are going to try to make political hay out of this and say,

oh look what trade and imports have done when in fact trade and imports have nothing to do with the

rising unemployment rate. In fact, imports have been going down over the last few years and we've had some of our lowest unemployment rates when trade levels have been at their highest.

So in my new book I look at the data lots of different ways and

there's no connection between trade and unemployment. There's no long-term trend in

unemployment. Trade isn't about more jobs or fewer jobs. It's

about better jobs and I am able to show that pretty convincingly I, in the book.

Nancy Pelosi, other Democrats, made a lot of hay after the recovery following September 11th

that this was a jobless recovery, and that is sort of a common refrain when it comes to

between Democrats and Republicans of recoveries that don't return us to the levels of employment in certain sectors that we had before the crash.

Employment is always a lagging indicator. Employers are slow to, they have to become convinced that the

recovery is over before they start adding jobs. The important thing is

what sort of jobs are being created. We're going to come out of this recession.

Unemployment's going to drop back to its long-term level. And what we found is over time in our more globalized economy the types of jobs that are

available to Americans have improved and I think it's one of the big lies of the

...