Only 345,000
June 5th, 2009. Filed under: Finance & Fitness Fridays.Yep. That’s what the job loses slowed down to during the month of May. I received a news alert from both The Washington Post and The New York Times telling me about the sharp reduction of job loses last month. Tell that to the 345,000 who lost their jobs and all the other jobless folks out there.
Even with this slowdown, the unemployment rate climbed to 9.4 percent. This is the highest it’s been in 26 years, and we all know that doesn’t include all the unemployed who have given up or underemployed people who have taken whatever they could find in order to feed their families and maybe pay on some of the bills.
The Post seems to think this is good news. “The information was welcome news, despite the rising jobless rate, because it suggested the furious pace of job losses — which peaked at 741,000 jobs lost in January — is finally easing. It is the strongest evidence yet that the economy’s downdraft of the winter has given way to a more steady, measured decline. ”
How many of you all out there think this is really good news? Me neither. It can’t be very good news if we have such a large number of jobless, and the count gets higher every day.
A total of six million jobs have now disappeared since the recession began in December 2007. It might only be called a recession right now, but it’s causing a lot of depression for a lot of folks. When are we going to admit that this recession is sliding into a depression? The big boys in DC aren’t going to admit it. It took them a year before they would admit that we are in the middle of a recession.