Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs in October

Thermometer Test

Right now is no time to come up short.

It's time to fight like hell for a democracy where minority rule cannot impose an extreme and cruel agenda, where the Big Lie is called a Big Lie, where facts matter, and where accountability at the polls and in the press has a fighting chance. We have our work cut out for us, and we urgently need to raise about 400,000 by Thursday, June 30, to finish our fiscal year on track and give it everything we possibly can. Please help us get there with a donation if you can right now.

$1,150,000

$1,350,000

Right now is no time to come up short. It's time to fight like hell for a democracy where minority rule cannot impose an extreme and cruel agenda, where facts matter, and where accountability at the polls and in the press has a fighting chance. We have our work cut out for us, and we still need to raise upwards of 400,000 by June 30 to give it everything we can. Please help:

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

I guess we all know that government “statistics” are totally phony, but just for laughs let’s take a look at the latest jobs report. The American economy added 161,000 new jobs last month, 90,000 of which were needed to keep up with population growth. This means that net job growth clocked in at a modest 71,000 jobs—not great, but OK. Job estimates for August and September were revised upward by 44,000. The headline unemployment rate improved slightly to 4.9 percent and the labor force participation rate ticked down slightly to 62.8 percent.

Hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees were up at an annual rate of about 2.3 percent compared to last month. This continues a streak of decent increases. A genuinely tight labor market would push that up even more, but with the rest of the world in the doldrums that’s probably not likely to happen anytime soon.