Better News on Jobs: Not a Miracle, but Progress

You've really got to hand it to President Barack Obama. On Thursday, he held a "jobs summit," and by Friday morning, America miraculously had 148,000 jobs it didn't have the day before.

Actually, it was an accident of timing. On Friday, the Labor Department released its monthly employment numbers, announcing to the surprise of many forecasters that only 11,000 jobs had been lost in November; the unemployment rate fell 0.2 points to an even 10 percent.

Then the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that 159,000 fewer jobs had been lost in September and October than it originally had estimated. Combine all this and overnight the work force had grown by 148,000 jobs.

Ten percent unemployment is still dangerously high. And if you count those who have become too discouraged to look for work and those who still are working but whose hours have been cut, the "real" unemployment rate is 17.2 percent.

Mr. Obama called the jobs report "another hopeful sign," but said, "We have a lot more work to do before we can celebrate."

The administration has been on the defensive about jobs since the Oct. 29 announcement that the GDP had increased 3.5 percent over the summer, meaning the recession had ended. Even though the stock market rallied, October's 10.2 percent unemployment cast a pall on any celebration.

The effectiveness of the Obama Administration's $787 billion economic stimulus was called into question just before the Thanksgiving holiday. Critics had a field day with discrepancies on recovery.gov, the federal website created as a kind of stimulus-spending and job-creation data dashboard.

But there's broad consensus among economists that the stimulus is preventing job loss, and Mr.

Obama argues that its the full effect won't be felt until next year.

For the "jobs summit," leaders from business, government and labor met Thursday at the White House to brainstorm. But other than calling for a new effort to put people to work weatherizing homes, the president played down expectations about how much more the government reasonably could do.

Howard Wall, vice president and regional economic advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis, said that last week's jobs data shows that losses in manufacturing and construction appear to be stabilizing. "Some sectors are doing well," he said, most notably professional and business services and health care and education.

Mr. Wall believes the most troubling problems with business credit appear to be over, and that there are healthy banks that are lending — especially in the St. Louis region. While we still face "a steep climb" to put everyone back into jobs, he said, St. Louis appears to be on track for a "decent recovery compared to the rest of the country."

This huge macro-economic problem also lends itself to some micro solutions. Chuck Aranda, director of Go Network, a program organized by the United Way and corporate sponsors, says there has been an outpouring of help for people who have lost jobs. The main strategies: encouragement, networking advice and how to sell yourself to prospective employers.

The key is encouraging people to "stay in the game." Everyone knows somebody who is looking for work, and helping is as simple as sitting down for a cup of coffee, keeping the job seeker in mind and thinking about people — or people who know people — who might be able to help.

In the end, it's the totality of data that matters. Unfortunately for global warming deniers, that evidence is stacked against

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