Democratic Underground - Here's a real world view of these numbers.

Robert Reich: The Real News on Jobs http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/the-real-news-on-jobs_b_831493.html

But to get to the most important trend you have to dig under the job numbers and look at what kind of new jobs are being created. That's where the big problem lies.

The National Employment Law Project did just that. Its new data brief shows that most of the new jobs created since February 2010 (about 1.26 million) pay significantly lower wages than the jobs lost (8.4 million) between January 2008 and February 2010.

While the biggest losses were higher-wage jobs paying an average of $19.05 to $31.40 an hour, the biggest gains have been lower-wage jobs paying an average of $9.03 to $12.91 an hour.

In other words, the big news isn't jobs. It's wages.

For a view as to why the Wisconsin workers need more attention from Washington, the article goes on to say:

The current attack on public-sector workers should be seen in this light. The charge is they now take home more generous pay and benefit packages than private-sector workers. It's not true on the wage side if you control for level of education, but it wasn't even true on the benefits side until private-sector benefits fell off a cliff. Meanwhile, across America, public-sector workers have been "furloughed," which is a nice word for not collecting any pay for weeks at a time.

At this rate, the unemployment rate will continue to decline. But so will the pay and benefits of most Americans.

This is why playing with numbers like this is the same as playing with people's lives. The richest .5% are wealthier than they ever were and made a killing from the bail out. They still have the money that they stole from us, money our government gave them. They are doing fine. And, all these happy numbers aside, the people of this country are not.

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