Today's jobs news, briefly: The official unemployment rate held steady at 9.6 percent. Overall employment fell, as government continued to shed jobs at every level, with the Census, state and local governments' altogether bleeding 160,000 jobs, more than twice the number created in the private sector.
Dan does the heavy lifting with the graphs and numbers. I want to give the report a bit of context.
If you feel like this jobs report is deja vu all over again, you're wrong. It's actual deja vu all over again, all over again. It's the same thing we've heard for the last four months.
-- Overall jobs declined, as they did all summer.
-- That's because we lost temporary Census jobs, as we did all summer.
-- We also lost thousands of state and local jobs, as we did all summer.
-- Private sector jobs went
up a little, as they did all summer. In the late spring and summer, we averaged about 70,000 new private sector jobs a month. In September, we got 65,000 new private sector positions.
-- Discouraged workers still number over a million, as
they were all summer.
-- The unemployment rate stayed over 9.5%, where it's been since the summer ... of 2009.
-- Health care led the way in private sector job creation, as it did all summer.