September Jobs Report: unemployment at four year low

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I am sure the Romney campaign will find some little-known blogger to come up with "unscewed" labor department statistics, just like they did for "unscewed" polls which show him (not) losing this election. The right-wing lives in a closed-loop alternate reality in which facts cannot penetrate their insular bubble. I am sure we will be hearing conspiracy theories this morning — that's what the right-wing thrives on for cognitive dissonance.

Steve Benen has the monthly jobs report for September. Job market shows signs of life, unemployment falls to 4-year low:

The new jobs report
released this morning was largely in line with expectations, showing a
U.S. economy that added 114,000 jobs in September. As is nearly always
the case, there was a gap in the public vs. private sectors — American
businesses added 104,000 jobs last month, while the government shed
another 10,000 jobs. [Thanks to Tea-Publican austerity measures at the state and local government level.]

* * *

[T]he new report is encouraging is the larger context: the unemployment
rate dipped to 7.8%, which is nearly a four-year low, and the revisions
found 86,000 additional, unreported jobs from the last two years.

And
while drops in the unemployment rate are sometimes the result of
Americans leaving the workforce, that's not the case in this new report
— the employment-to-population ratio went up, not down.

By most measures, this can fairly be described as a strong jobs report, at least relative to where we've been.

For context, I'd note that so far in 2012, the economy has created over
1.3 million jobs over, which isn't even close to being good enough, but
the total is already better than five of the eight years of the
Bush/Cheney era.

Here is another chart, this one showing monthly job losses/gains in just the private sector since the start of the Great Recession. [31 consecutive months of private sector job growth.]

Brian Beutler adds at Talkingpointsmemo, Huge Drop In Unemployment, Economy Adds 114,000 Jobs:

[The] initially disappointing August jobs figure was revised significantly upward Friday from 96,000 to 142,000.

The news indicates that the economy and the labor market performed
significantly better over the course of the summer than initial reports
suggested at the time. July payrolls were also revised significantly
upward to a final figure of 181,000 new jobs.

Growth came largely in the health care and transportation sectors,
according to the report, while the manufacturing sector lost 16,000 jobs
overall.

But the news also has political implications. Last month, the
Department of Labor released broader revisions which pointed to the fact
that more jobs had been created during the recover than had been lost
in the slump — putting Obama into net positive job creation territory
over the course of his presidency. Friday’s report builds on that
record.

The significant downward tick in unemployment also moots a favored
Republican talking point — that the unemployment rate has not dropped
below 8 percent since it first climbed above that level early in Obama’s
presidency.

Did you get that you lazy media villagers who parrot the GOP talking points? The Bogus 'Mitt Math' net jobs argument fails and President Obama is no longer behind the magic eight percent number.