Quote stolen from Paul Simon off the Graceland album. And it pretty much describes this month's jobs numbers. Seasonally adjusted, we added 209,000 jobs from June, and June and May were adjusted upward by 15,000, for a total gain of 224,000. Not bad, but not big either.
But if we add up the last six months, we've gained just shy of 1.5 million jobs since January, which is actually decent job growth even by pre-recession standards. (Not great, but decent. Enough to start making a difference, if we could get another year of this.) We're just about equal with the best period of job growth during the Bush years, though what that really tells you is how anemic job growth had been during the Bush years, even before the Great Recession hit.
So this past month could have been better, but it could have been a lot worse. And maybe, just maybe, we're starting to get some sort of virtuous cycle going here, where enough people are getting back to work and spending money to put more people back to work.
It's way the hell overdue, and it's definitely in spite of the GOP's best efforts to sabotage our economy, but better late than never. I'll be knocking on wood and keeping my fingers crossed.
