they are not consistent with anything, anything, gdp, ism survey. how do you make sense of this? i ll tell you how i make sense of it, next month, we ll get the bench mark revision and they ll be all revised up. jared bernstein, former chief economist for vice president joe biden, former msnbc contributor and fellow at the policy and priorities. do you agree with mark zandi? to a point. the underlying trend before this report was 200,000 jobs a month. as you mention, 74,000 for december is way below trend. and there s a lot of noise in the monthly data, and it wouldn t surprise me if, again, the numbers get revised up. however, i wouldn t go as far as my good friend mark in terms of throwing the number out, because, a, it s not entirely inconsistent with an economic recovery that s thrown a lot of head banks, if i can use a basketball term, at the job