Today's Unemployment Report: Deja Vu, All Over Again

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.

After an eds and meds decade, it's an eds and meds "recovery." Between 1999 and 2009, health care accounted for 5.2 million jobs, while the private sector netted about a million. The trend continues. Health care and education -- both handmaidens of government spending, you could say -- accounted for 40,000 new jobs in a month when private employment netted only 65,000 new positions.

Finally, I'd ask you to imagine the state of Missouri. Imagine the entire state unemployed. Now imagine the entire state out of work for more than six months. That's what we have, with 6.1 million Americans without a job now for more than half a year.