06/21/2010

Madness to the Method

At 8:30 a.m. on Friday, June 4, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its much anticipated monthly jobs report. Expectations were running high that the U.S. job market was finally rebounding. And at first glance, the numbers released looked decent, with 431,000 jobs added and the unemployment rate dropping modestly, to 9.7%. On closer inspection, the report didn't seem as good: more than 400,000 of those new jobs were due to the government's hiring Census workers rather than companies' ramping up for growth. The jobless rate decreased only because hundreds of thousands of people became so discouraged, they dropped out of the workforce.
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