Mitt Romney (Jae C. Hong/AP)Mitt Romney slammed President Obama over a new labor report Friday that found the economy had added just 115,000 jobs last month, suggesting the country's 8.1 percent unemployment is "not a cause for celebration."
But in using the numbers to attack Obama's handling of the economy, Romney also revealed some potentially troublesome benchmarks for what job creation would look like if he were elected to the White House.
Speaking at a concrete company outside Pittsburgh, Romney trashed the news from the April jobs report. While he noted that the country's 8.1 percent unemployment rate was actually down slightly from March, the presumptive Republican nominee pointed out that was because many people had given up looking for work.
"Just this morning there was some news that came across the wire that said that the unemployment rate has dropped to 8.1 percent and normally that would be cause for celebration, but, in fact, anything over 8 percent, anything near 8 percent anything over 4 percent is not cause for celebration," Romney declared.
But Romney's embrace of the 4 percent metric could be problematic. The last time the country's unemployment rate was that low was in December 2000.
But that's not the only benchmark Romney set today. In an interview on Fox News, Romney suggested the country should be seeing a growth of 500,000 jobs per month—nearly four times the job growth numbers the country experienced last month.
"We should be seeing numbers in the 500,000 jobs created per month," Romney told Fox News. "This is way, way, way off from what should happen in a normal recovery. … This is not progress. This is very, very disappointing."
But as the New York Times' Peter Baker points out, the country has met that level of job creation in a single month just five times in the last 50 years—including just once each under Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
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