The American Spectator : The Spectacle Blog : Sept. Job Losses Worse Than Expected; Unemployment 9.8%

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The Spectacle Blog

Sept. Job Losses Worse Than Expected; Unemployment 9.8%

By Philip Klein on 10.2.09 @ 9:13AM

One thing that the Obama administration seemed to have going for it was the ability to claim that even though the economy was still shedding jobs, it was doing so at a slower pace. They can't make that claim today.

The Labor Department reported this morning that the economy lost 263,000 jobs in September, up from a revised 201,000 in August. Economists were expecting the September number to be around 175,000, according to a Bloomberg survey.The unemployment rate now stands at 9.8 percent.

Some other numbers worth noting:

--The economy has now lost 2.7 million jobs since the economic stimulus bill was signed.

-- There were 706,000 discouraged workers in September, who are not looking for work because they think no jobs are available, and thus are not included in the unemployment rate.

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Pingback| 10.2.09 @ 11:15AM

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…Philip Klein amspec American Spectator 111 Show more Shortened Links Linking to the spectator.org page http://bit.ly/B3vVA info 3 tweets Tweet The American Spectator : AmSpecBlog : Sept. Job Losses Worse Than Expected; Unemployment 9.8% spectator.org/blog/2009/10/02/sept-job-losses-worse-than-exp – view page – cached One thing that the Obama administration seemed to have going for…

nohype| 10.2.09 @ 7:54PM

If you look at the data in the report, you will see that the number of people employed dropped by 785K. 571K dropped out of the labor force and the number of unemployed rose by 214K. The change in employment is a better measure of jobs lost than the change in unemployment.

See http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf