Horrible. But, A Better Than Expected Jobs Number.

OK, I was wrong. I had projected a loss of 200,000 jobs for last month; and, only 125,000 jobs were actually lost (Click here to See Story: Payrolls drop by 125K, jobless rate falls).

If you net out the 225,000 Census workers who were let go, there was actually a net job creation of 100,000 workers in the month. This was certainly better than the prior month's job's increase of 21,000. However, of that 100,000 new jobs, only 83,000 were in the private sector; with another 17,000 tax-eaters being added to the government payrolls. Sadly, this 83,000 falls well short, by at least a factor of 2, in just covering normal population growth. Therefore, you can only conclude that job growth in this country is seriously slumping after seeing two months of horribly weak numbers.

However, thanks again to the magic of creative math, the unemployment rate fell tw0-tenths of a percent to 9.5% because the Bureau of Labor and Statistics concluded that 652,000 workers just quit looking for work and, therefore, really weren't a part of the overall workforce. The under-employment rate, once at a post-Great Depression record rate of 16.9% before any Census workers were added, was better again last month, but still at a breath-stealing rate of 16.5%

As usual, our hero, Barack, put as much political spin as possible on this terrible number by claiming it was the 6th straight month of job growth this year. He also had the gall to claim that 600,000 jobs were added to the economy when, just last month, 652,000 completely stopped looking for work out of sheer frustration. If B.S. was rocket fuel, Obama could rocket his way to the farthest galaxies.