Unemployment Rate Worsens, Jobs Increase Moderately

Once again, the unemployment rate dropped a lot in the U.S., and it is a bad thing. People are reporting it is good. It is not. There is nothing good about it.

It can only be good if it drops for the right reasons. It essentially represents the percentage of people who are in the workforce who have a job, so the good way to decrease the rate is for people in the workforce without jobs to get jobs. But it decreased instead by losing 700,000 people from the workforce entirely. Basically, we just stopped counting them.

The increase in the number of jobs -- and of course, this number is just preliminary -- is good. We got 288K last month, which is above our average for the 12-month period of January 2004-2005 (220K), when we hit our last recovery in full swing. Our current 12-month average is a little under 200K. So, it's comparable.

But the problem is that we are way behind. The real stat that matters is that in 2005, 62.7% of the population was employed, and now it's 58.9%. We need to keep up 288K a month for a few years to even hope to get back to that.