Where Are The Jobs, Barry?

Matt Margolis

Well, the new numbers are out… Unemployment remains teetering around ten percent — even though Obama said it wouldn’t go above 8 percent — and even the though the unemployment edged down a bit, 20,000 jobs were lost, we’ve still lost 8.4 million jobs in this recession. How many jobs “saved or created” does that come out to?

 Is Barry proud of this? Is this a solid B-plus economy? Is 16.5 percent underemployment the best this administration can deliver?

UPDATE: Past Deficits vs. Obama’s Deficits in Pictures

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan: Mish breaks down the job numbers:

In the continuing theater of BLS absurdities, the unemployment rate fell to 9.7% in spite of a 25th consecutive month of job losses. Some stopped counting at 22 months in November. However, I find November questionable.

This month professional services contributed 44,00 jobs to the plus side, but 52,000 of them were part-time jobs. Amazingly a table below shows the number of part-time workers decreased by 849,000 from last month. Go figure.

Moreover, the so-called 64,000 rise in November can be attributed to the seasonally adjusted hiring of 94,000 temporary workers…

Read the whole thing.

Me: I’m doubtful about this 9.7% number – it just doesn’t make sense given that we’re still shedding jobs and I can’t imagine that many people getting discouraged while there was a recent extension of unemployment benefits (once your benefits run out, you’re no longer counted as unemployed, even if you haven’t got a job). There’s always been a bit of BS in the unemployment numbers but it still has been a useful metric because it used the same methodology all the time, and thus you could at least spot the trends (ie, is unemployment going up, or going down?)…but now, I’m not so sure. I wonder if someone is playing around with the number of discouraged workers? The more such there are, the better the official unemployment rate looks…and who really gets to say who is “discouraged”? Given the rank dishonesty of the Obama Administration, its easy to believe they are faking the numbers.