AFP

WASHINGTON REPUBLICAN White House hopeful Mitt Romney slammed Friday’s “terrible” US jobs report despite an unemployment rate dip, saying the economy should be creating four times more jobs than the current pace.

“This is way off from what should happen in a normal recovery,” the presumptive Republican nominee told Fox News, saying the country be creating half a million jobs a month instead of the paltry 115,000 jobs that the Labour Department said were created in April.

“It’s a terrible and very disappointing report this morning.

Clearly, the American people are wondering why this recovery isn’t happening faster.” The new data showed a dip in the unemployment rate from 8.2 percent to 8.1 percent, the lowest level since Obama took office in January 2009, but it marked a slowdown in job creation.

“We seem to be slowing down, not speeding up. This is not progress,” Romney said.

Obama makes his first official re-election campaign foray on Saturday, heading to the battleground states of Ohio and Virginia, while Romney is in the swing state of Pennsylvania on Friday.

Romney issued an open letter to Obama on Friday on the eve of the president’s trip to the Midwest. “Welcome to Ohio. I have a simple question for you: Where are the jobs?” Romney wrote in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, as he blasted Obama for failing to get the unemployment rate south of 8.0 percent.

“I recognise, of course, as do all Americans, that you inherited an economic crisis. But you’ve now had three years to turn things around,” he wrote.

“Mr President, forgive me for being blunt, but when it comes to economic affairs, you’re out of your depth.” Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts and millionaire investor and businessman, cited his “more than two decades working in the private sector, starting new businesses and turning around failing ones.”