Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.
Today is new jobs day, and my usual chart is below. It shows the number of net new jobs created over the past few years; that is, the number of new jobs above the 90,000 per month needed just to keep up with population growth and tread water. In December, that amounted to 110,000 net new jobs, pushing the headline unemployment rate down to 8.5%. Not bad. Karl Smith has all the internals plus a few more graphs if you want to dive deeper into the data.
