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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2006-02-03

Chuggin' Along: 4.7%

Employers stepped up hiring in January, boosting payrolls by 193,000 and lowering the nation's unemployment rate to 4.7 percent, the lowest since July 2001. . .

Moreover, job growth in December turned out to be stronger than previously thought. Revised figures showed payrolls expanded by 140,000 _ an improvement over the 108,000 new jobs first estimated a month ago.

Would have been great for the President to make more of an issue of ACTUAL job numbers in the SOTU on Tuesday, because I think the general public only ocassionally sees job reports like this--especially given the exempt media's bias against reporting news that makes the President look good.

To that point, notice how AP Economics writer Jeannine Aversa slips in a little gloom and doom with your morning good news:

Despite good news on some economic matters, Americans still feel anxious about the economy, polls indicate.

Even though, of course, the latest rating of consumer confidence showed surprising strength--but never mind reality.

Moreover, the datae indicate that this is not "low-paying jobs" that are being created; nor are workers "falling behind."

Job gains were fairly broad based, with employment growing in construction, manufacturing, professional and business services and education and health care. Those employment gains blunted job losses in retailing and government.

Got that? "Job losses in government." That's gotta be a good thing, too.

Employees' average hourly earnings climbed to $16.41 in January, up 0.4 percent from December. That increase was slightly larger than the 0.3 percent rise that economists were expecting.

And now, to return to a theme I started months ago, I ask "How's the stock market responding? This is good news, and should encourage the buyers." Right? Wrong. As of right now (8:20 local time) the Dow Jones is down 54 points.

I don't get the stock market.

But the jobs are all good. At some point, America's gonna take notice that the economy is actually quite strong, and that a great deal of that strength can be attributed to the policies of this President.

Posted by: Michael / 2/03/2006 08:10:00 AM

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