Are you basking? Because 8.6 percent is pretty low for These Times of Ours. So bask! Bask like you haven’t basked since March of 2009, the last time the unemployment rate was this low!
Okay, that’s enough. Seriously, cut it out. Because despite the big drop in the unemployment rate from 9 percent to 8.6 percent, the economy only added 120,000 jobs in November, which is actually a touch less than expected. An extra 72,000 jobs were also added to the totals from September and October, which is good. But the economy needs 125,000 jobs a month just to keep the unemployment rate steady, Reuters tells us. The only reason it dropped so precipitously this month is because 315,000 people stopped looking for work, removing themselves from the labor force and thus, the unemployment tally. All that basking you did before was kind of ridiculous, actually.
