august

4000 jobs lost during the month of August. It is hard to spin this stat. I know that the neocons will try but the difference between marginal job growth and a loss of a number of jobs is huge!! It will be hard to blame the Democrats for this one but I bet that Rush and the gang will try.

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From the Economic Policy Institute:

In an unexpectedly and extremely weak employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the nation’s payrolls shrunk last month, the first monthly decline since August 2003. Prior months’ job gains were revised down by 81,000, leading to an average monthly gain of just 44,000 over the past three months. Such a low monthly rate of job growth provides the first solid evidence that economic turmoil in financial markets has found its way into the job market.

The unemployment rate, calculated from the survey of households, was unchanged at 4.6%, but this was due not to job growth in that concurrent survey. In fact, employment fell 316,000 last month according to the more volatile (and thus less reliable on a monthly basis) household survey. Averaging over the year, that survey shows a monthly decline in jobs of 16,500 so far in 2007.