Jen Rubin picks up the key math in an ABC story from last Friday laughably headlined Unemployment Falls: Recession Fears Ease After Jobs Report.
Before the Obama downgrade, which sent double-dip fears rising as much as the Dow will likely be sinking again later this morning. But here's the point:
Payrolls expanded by 117,000 jobs in July as unemployment fell to 9.1 percent, a bit of good news in what has been a dismal series of economic reports this summer...
...in July, businesses added 154,000 jobs across many industries, the Labor Department said. Governments cut 37,000 jobs last month, though 23,000 of those losses were almost entirely because of the shutdown of Minnesota's state government.
Still, even with better July numbers, the economy is not creating enough jobs to bring unemployment down significantly. The unemployment rate fell because 193,000 people left the labor force.
Let's help the folks at ABC with some first grade math on what they deem as "good news". We'll focus strictly on the private sector:
(+)117,000 new jobs
(-)193,000 unemployed Americans who became dispirited and stopped looking for work
(=)-76,000 jobs, if the above Americans had been counted
But when you use government math, and simply eliminate the 193K unemployed who took a breather from searching in vain during the summer doldrums, you get...a decrease in the unemployment rate, which of course is an indication the economy is turning around under the Obama economic program.
Well, until S&P weighed in....