Even As Jobs Numbers Seem Better...

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/dave-johnson/55327/even-as-jobs-numbers-seem-better

Even As Jobs Numbers Seem Better...
Jobs
by Dave Johnson | April 12, 2014 - 10:56am

Thursday’s unemployment applications number hit a 7-year low of (seasonally adjusted) 300,000, a drop of 32,000. We have restored the number of jobs lost in the Great Recession. This is indeed good news.

But even so, things are not rosy in the unemployment numbers – pay is really low and lots of people are really hurting – and Republicans in Congress continue to obstruct all efforts to improve the situation.

Thursday’s Number Is Good News

This week’s Labor Department report of the number of people applying for new unemployment applications reached a seven-year low, with 300,000 people (seasonally adjusted) applying. This was a drop of 32,000 from the prior week. This chart show why this is good news.



Last week’s unemployment report for March showed that the economy has finally created enough new jobs to make up for all of the jobs lost after the 2008 Wall Street crash. Unfortunately, that’s just catching up to where we were in 2008; that doesn’t account for all the new people needing jobs and for the fact that so many of those new jobs pay so much less than the jobs that went away. At the Roosevelt Institute’s Next New Deal blog Wednesday, Jeff Madrick explains, in “America Can Attain Full Employment with a Bold Approach to the Jobs Emergency,”