Unemployment 8.6%, why do I hear no hoorays (except at TIME MAG)?

Time:

American Unemployment Falls to 8.6%: Amazing News, But Is It a Game Changer?

What’s more, the jobless percentage, which fell to 8.6% in November from 9.0% a month before, was the lowest it’s been in two and a half years. This alone is good news but it’s even more amazing considering where we came from. Just four months ago, the obstacles for the economy seemed to be piling up.

Feinman for DB Advisors pointed out, as did others, that about 300,000 people gave up looking for work. Not a great sign, and one of the reasons why the drop in the unemployment rate may not be as great as it looks. “The job numbers were consistent with modest growth,” says Feinman.

But, to me, the number suggests that the economy could be picking up. The reason has to do with new businesses. When the government goes and asks employers about their payrolls, they survey the same group of companies all year long. So when a growing number of companies are being started, the household number can be a more accurate account of what is going on in the economy. One of the problems of the recovery is that because it is harder to get loans fewer people have been starting up new businesses. Indeed, there has been a fear that the U.S. has lost its entrepreneurial spirit. But banks have recently begun lending more, making it easier for more people to start new businesses. And that’s what we may be experiencing now. That’s not just good news for the unemployed, but for the long-term health of the economy in general.

Read more: http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2011/12/02/american-unemployment-falls-to-8-6-amazing-news-but-is-it-a-game-changer/#ixzz1fT9xEM7W

And now if want realism on the left (at least on this issue), THE NEW REPUBLIC:

First: Despite the growth of the working-age population over the past four years, the labor force (roughly, the sum of those employed plus job-seekers) has not expanded. For various reasons, more and more Americans have been dropping out of the labor force. If Americans of working age were participating in the labor force at the same rate as they were at the onset of the recession, the labor force would be nearly 5 million people larger, and unemployment would be significantly worse in both absolute and percentage terms.

Second: Despite the modest economic recovery since the recession ended in mid-2009, total employment remains more than 5.5 million below the level of 2007 and about 1.6 million below where it was when President Obama took office.

Third: To regain full employment (5 percent, which happens to be the same as the level when the recession began) with the pre-recessionary labor force participation rate, we would need 150.7 million jobs—10.1 million more than we have today. That’s a reasonable measure of the hole we’re still in, two and a half years since the official end of the recession.

The American people are unlikely to cheer up about the economy until we get appreciably closer to the top of the hole.

Bill Galston is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing editor forThe New Republic.

While the **UNSUPPORTED BY LINKS** delusions, and the **UNSUPPORTED BY LINKS** assertions such ‘the number suggests that the economy could be picking up’ at Time Mag continues, in what one might think is a left of center, BUT STILL CENTER, Time, The New Republic, a publication of the left is obviously more grounded in reality.

As is Brookings.

Time Magazine is CREEPY in their craven, extended lingus position.

Check out the comments over there from the link.

Hooray for the New Republic, who once chose Harry Truman over the socialist left.

“We’re tightening our belts in terms of spending,” Michael White, chief executive officer of the largest U.S. satellite-TV provider, said in an interview last week. “We’ll cut back on overhead, hiring and programming.”