Saturday, February 4, 2012

Good Jobs

The January unemployment report is, according to Ezra Klein, all good.

The headline numbers are great, of course: payrolls are up by 243,000 jobs. Unemployment is down to 8.3 percent. But the inside numbers are good, too.

Let’s start with where the jobs were created. Professional and business services added 70,000 positions. Manufacturing added 50,000. Leisure and hospitality was up by 44,000. Health care was up by 33,000. For comparison, in the December jobs report, more than 40,000 of the 200,000 new jobs were “messengers and couriers,” which seemed likely to be seasonal hiring. Not so this month.

Revisions are positive, too. November goes from 100,000 new jobs to 157,000 new jobs. December goes from 200,000 new jobs to 203,000 new jobs. So the real number for the just-released jobs report is 303,000 jobs: that’s how many we added in January, plus what we just added to the numbers from November and December. Nicely done, economy.

Further evidence that the GOP is flat-out lying when they claim that President Obama has made the economy worse. Or, as Roger Ebert tweeted: “Stock market up, jobless rate falls again, most troops home, bin Laden dead. Over to you, GOP.”

Not to worry, Roger; the Republicans in Congress will find some way to sabotage the recovery just so they can run on it.