Job Creation (January 2010)

When it comes to the job market these days, the best you can say is that the news is less bad.

Employment is now contracting one-tenth as fast as it was a year ago. We were losing jobs at a nightmarish rate of 690,000 per month in the first quarter of last year; in the quarter just ended, that loss rate fell to 69,000 jobs per month. Unemployment appears recently stabilized, though at an unacceptably high level of 10 percent.

Early last year, the administration told us that the $787 billion burst of pork-barrel government spending known as the stimulus was the magic elixir that would hold unemployment below 8 percent.

While the White House keeps changing their job-calculation methods in a desperate effort to claim their so-called stimulus bill is working, Americans are still asking: Where are the jobs?

“I came from nothing and now I have a job that is a future for me. Not just a job, an actual career.”