Unemployment Falls to 8.8% - Yay

Today the US Labor Department announced the the nation's unemployment rate fell to it's lowest point in two years - 8.8%.  This signifies a whopping .1% drop from the month before.  All of that work by Congress and the President as well as state legislators must finally be paying off as they promised to "create jobs".  In fact, more than 200,000 jobs were created last month.  That is the second straight month that at least 200,000 jobs were created - the first time since 2006.  


But don't get out the confetti yet.  As I was always taught in college, figures lie and liars figure.   So lets take a look at some real numbers.  The number of unemployed people dipped to 13.5 million in March, still almost double the amount of people since before the recession officially began in December 2007.  And more importantly, the percentage of people who are working part-time jobs but would rather be working full-time and those who gave up looking for work altogether now stands at 15.7%.  So when added together almost 24% of the American workforce is either unemployed or underemployed.  Or to put it simply, almost 1 in 4 American workers are not very happy with their situation right now. 

While today's news may seem to get the investors and speculators all giddy, I warn against throwing any wild celebrations yet.  Even if jobs continue to be created at this rate, it will only lead to a growth of nearly 2.5 million jobs by the end of the year.  But remember that nearly 7.5 million jobs were lost since the recession began.  Besides that, massive budget cuts by the government at all levels are going to begin creating even larger job losses within the public sector in the next few months, negating many of the jobs created within the private sector.

Throw in the growing gas and food prices, continued billions of dollars thrown to the wars in the Middle East on a daily basis, and the inability of our current legislators to produce any job that doesn't require joining the military or cleaning up an oil spill and we have the table set to tip us right into another recession rather quickly.  

So while today's unemployment news may be making Wall Street ecstatic, I remind you that most of the jobs created last month were in the financial/banking sector.  Wasn't it a banking collapse that put us in this situation to begin with?