The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) just released its Feburary “Employment Situation Summary” which reports 227,000 net new jobs in the US economy for the month. Among other things, that’s good news for the Obama re-election campaign. If Barack Obama can stand up at an October debate and say, “We’ve still got a ways to go but we’re moving in the right direction—2 million new jobs since the beginning of this year….”, then he’ll stand an excellent chance of winning November’s election.
The “cherry on top” is all the way at the end of the report—the very last sentence in fact: “The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for December was revised from +203,000 to +223,000, and the change for January was revised from +243,000 to +284,000.”
In other words, an additional 61,000 jobs were created in the previous two months that the BLS’ initial estimate missed. Job creation still isn’t happening fast enough to recover from the job losses of the Great Recession; but at least it’s moving in the right direction.
P.S. Steve Benen, now writing on Rachel Maddow’s blog, is the “gold standard” for tracking and interpreting this data over the last few years. Check him out.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/