Unemployment Shows Small Improvement

The Labor Department released it unemployment figures for the month of January yesterday, and there was some definite improvement. About 243,000 new jobs were created, and unlike most months in 2011, that showed a real (although small) improvement. Too often last year, the number of jobs created did not top the number of new entrants to the labor force (about 150,000 a month), but January's number did. That's means the drop in unemployment from 8.5% to about 8.3% was a  real drop (rather than a numbers game).

This is good news for Democrats, since a falling unemployment rate means the chances for President Obama being re-elected is improved -- and it would be vastly improved if the rate could drop below 8% in the coming months. If January is an indicator, that could be a real possibility. But while the numbers are good politically and show some movement in the right direction, it is not nearly enough to quickly solve our unemployment problem.

At the rate of only 243,000 jobs a month being created, it would take many years to get the unemployment rate back down to 3% or 4% (which is considered full employment). The government needs to take some serious action to encourage a lot more job creation a lot quicker. As long as we have many millions of unemployed and underemployed people, our economy will continue to suffer (except for the rich, who are doing great).

How many people are out of work. The U.S. government puts the official unemployment figure at 12.8 million. Of course that is an undercount since the government only counts those people who have actively looked for work in the last four weeks. There are other that have given up trying to find work or run out of places to apply for work. The government puts their number at about 2.8 million (also undoubtably an undercount since these people are harder to account for). But just accepting the government numbers, that means there at least 15.6 million people unemployed in the United States.

But that 15.6 million doesn't tell the whole story either. There are another 8.2 million people who are working part-time because they can't find full-time jobs. They would like to work full-time, but the jobs don't exist to allow them to do that. When you add them to the unemployed, you come up with a figure of 23.8 million. That's the number of Americans who would like to have full-time work but can't find it. That's the number of jobs that needs to be created in this country. And at 243,000 jobs a month, it's going to take a very long time to do that.

The January numbers were an improvement, but only a tiny improvement. Much more is needed, and that means some way is going to have to be found to get around the obstructionism of congressional Republican. The best way is to vote them out of office in November. If that doesn't happen, it's going to be a long and tough slog to improve the economy and create enough jobs.