depress the numbers. you know, fabricate it in the census. let s not look at the actual literal number. 83 minus 125. let s look at the trends. what we see is the unemployment rate, the very broad unemployment rate, which captures part time, people workers and things of this nature, these are all trending down. we are having a recovery. that s real. that s not today even though i think people will debate it, what s worrisome is it will take six, seven, eight years to repair what happened with the jobs and we don t have that much time. adding to that, we have a couple of other numbers. the 30% drop in pending home sales. we have seen the dow at its lowest since october 30th of last year. there are also some that say if we pull become on stimulus and spending right now,s on s s o s going to be in more trouble. 9.5% is an improvement and it
125 thousand then jobs overall. the numbers are adding to worries that people are giving up on finding jobs. with us is our economics reporter steve leesman. let s unpack this. it s a tad confusing. on the one hand we see a rate that is the lowest we have seen in months. at the same time more jobs were cut. how do we make sense of this? there is a lot of unpacking to do. let s start with the unemployment rate. it fell for the wrong reasons. people left the workforce about 650,000 people left and that causes the rate to decline. that is not a good sign. i hate to tell you that. take the thing you thought you could follow, mot this time. 9.5% is not a good sign because of how we arrived there. better numbers inside that. the minus 125 includes a minus 230,000 decline in the census workers. that s off. now you are feeling better? not so quickly.