The New York Times reports some great news this morning:
The United States added a robust 200,000 new jobs last month, the Labor Department said Friday, in a sign that the long-awaited economic recovery has finally built up a head of steam.
The nation’s unemployment rate fell to 8.5 percent in December, from a revised 8.7 percent in November, the government said. The Labor Department revised the number of new jobs added in November to 100,000, from 120,000.
With that, the U.S. unemployment rate is now just about where it started when President-elect Obama inherited an economy in freefall when he took office in late January 2009. If we look at the unemployment rate since the economic recovery act started really kicking in (note that it was passed with no Republican support) – several months or longer for many of the infrastructure projects to get going – and when one considers the huge, negative momentum the Republican Recession had going when President Obama took office, today’s unemployment rate is now significantly below where it was back in early-to-mid 2009 (around 9.5% then, 8.5% now). And remember, all of this has come in spite of constant Republican attempts to water down or derail economic recovery efforts, to talk down the economy (even this morning, the head of the RNC is doing just that), and to ensure that Obama’s presidency “failed.” Well, sorry Republican’ts, but the only thing that’s going to fail, come November 2012, is your chances of being elected. That is, if the American people want to keep the economic recovery going, and not send us right back into the ditch Republican’ts drove us into in the first place. Tough choice, huh? (not)
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