Unemployment Drops To 9.7% In January

Which would be good news, except that the country is still losing jobs. And they’re also revising previous jobs reports to reflect even more job losses than previously thought.

WASHINGTON — The unemployment rate dropped unexpectedly in January to 9.7 percent from 10 percent while employers shed 20,000 jobs, the government said Friday.
The rate dropped because a survey of households found the number of employed Americans rose by 541,000, the Labor Department said. The job losses are calculated from a separate survey of employers.
The report also included an annual revision to the estimates of total payrolls, which showed there were 930,000 fewer jobs last March than previously estimated. The department also revised down its estimates for April through October of last year, adding another 433,000 job losses.

Also keep in mind that the unemployment number can be misleading because it doesn’t count people who have given up looking for a job. Those people still want jobs. They still need jobs. But they’ve been out of work for so long they’ve given up looking and so aren’t considered officially unemployed any more.
Plus, in the last few weeks initial jobless claims have been climbing, and a healthy junk of the jobs noted in this report were created…in government.
Hardly a sustainable way to bring about economic recovery.
And don’t forget what Obama has in store for us policy-wise. More taxes. More regulation. The end of the Bush tax cuts. More big spending.
All of which makes the chance of a “double dip” recession a very real possibility. The hangover from this big spending boozefest we’ve been on for the last year is going to be a nasty one.