What is a job? Defined by a steady monthly paycheck or defined by creation of real value as recognized in a free market place? Are two guys working for the government job creation program, one digging a hole in the ground and the other fill it back up, are the pair counted as two jobs? if they get laid off from their sinecure "jobs," one becoming a street artist sketching instant portraits for a living while the other selling trinkets imported from Venus, neither reporting themselves on any payroll data . . . has the economy suddenly lost two jobs or gained two real jobs?
Imports can displace domestic producers only if the imports can offer a better value to the consumers, in fact an incremental value so great as to offset the cost of transportation, additional warehousing and the cost of money during transit. The incremental value proposition is to the benefit of everyone, except for the inefficient producer, who can now be freed from its erstwhile bondage of inefficiency and go forth find a new career.
IMHO, the official payroll jobs data may well be seriously under-counting real job creation. There are far more independent contractors in the economy, whether legal or illegal ones (in tax law terms, not talking about drugs); on top of that, cheap imported manufactured goods and cheap imported labor (immigrants) may well be enabling more family to afford having one parent spend more time with the children. That shows up in the decoupling between official job creation numbers and official jobless numbers, given the population increase.
What we are witnessing in the discrepancies amongst various official labor statistics may well be the natural consequences of the increasing regulatory cost of hiring people on the traditional payroll. The emergence of an "under-economy" that is not reflected in the payrolls at all and not taxed at all may well have the net effect of lowering effective tax rate . . . although the statutory illegality does pose other adverse social consequences.
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