The United States will register job gains between 100,000 to 200,000 per month for the rest of the year, predicts Vice President Joseph Biden.
With May employment data due Friday, that would mean an addition of 700,000 to 1.4 million jobs by year-end.
The median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg calls for a 508,000 payroll gain in May, but much of that is temporary census workers.
Payrolls increased by 290,000 in April and 230,000 in March. Given that trend, Biden isn’t exactly stepping out on a limb in his prediction, which was made on the Charlie Rose show.
The economy will "create between 100,000 and 200,000 jobs on average all the way through this year," the vice president said. He declined to predict when unemployment will drop back to 6 percent. It hit 9.9 percent in April.
Employment increases will help the Democrats in November elections, showing that government can help the economy, Biden says.
"There's a strain that exists within the tea party that just has this overwhelming distaste for and distrust for government, period," he said.
"And there's a tendency to inflate and conflate things that the government is doing. But I would say to the tea party people, you don't like federal government, you think we should not be involved in the oil spill? It's private enterprise. What are we supposed to do? Is the federal government not needed?"
Biden also says tea partyers may cause problems for the Republicans.
“There are some Democrats rooting for the tea party to take over the Republican Party,” he said, adding that he isn’t one of them.
The latest Rasmussen poll doesn’t back up Biden’s comments.
It shows that for the week ended May 30, Republican congressional candidates held a seven percentage point lead over Democrats on a generic ballot, broadly consistent with weekly results from the past year.
The survey showed that 44 percent of likely voters would choose their district's Republican congressional candidate, compared to 37 percent for the Democrat.
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