Hope in February's Unemployment Numbers

Read the story here:Unemployment Rate Falls in February, U.S. Adds 192K Jobs

Unemployment numbers from February indicate a small decrease in overall U.S. unemployment figures dropping to 8.9% from a steady 9% throughout most of the winter season. The private sector added 192,000 jobs last month, almost double the monthly average from all months last year. Job growth occured in sectors such as healthcare, construction, and office administration. The last time the U.S. saw this number of jobs added was in 2006 however, the percentage of American's seeking work remains at just 64.2%, a very low rate comparable to March of 1984.

To me, this seems like news to expend a little bit of hope over. It's not that unemployment is significantly down but more so that job growth is significantly up. I was curious as to how this data played out so I made myself a graph I'd like to share:

It may be difficult to read the legend so let me fill you in: Everything in BLUE represents 2008 so you can blame all that mess on the Bush Administration. The rest of the bars you can blame on the Obama Administration as he took office January 20, 2009 with RED = 2009, GREEN = 2010, and PURPLE = 2011. I'm sure everyone noted that the positive gains were all post-Bush. ;) Or, here is another way you can look at the data. The purple chunks represent a chronological timeline beginning with the same time period, January 2008 moving through to today's data, February 2011. The green line is the number of jobs either added or lost during that time:

So in short, we have been on nothing but an upwards trend with jobs starting with Obama's move into office. Don't get me wrong, I think there are a lot of measures this administration could have taken that would have pulled us out of this crap a lot faster, but the numbers don't lie and we are seeing improvement.

Before I get too high up on my horse, I would like to mention the one factor that could either plop us straight back into the middle of this recession, or pull us straight out - gas prices. There is speculation on both sides of this and I tend to agree with the former in that this is going to harm, not help our situation. Those who say the rise in gas prices may help believe that it could significantly impact other countries who pay a lot more for oil than we do here and as a result, manufacturing jobs may start coming home where oil is cheaper to use. I can't say I'm that optimistic. We, as a country, have very limited alternatives for the ground transportation of products that doesn't involve a couple of tanks of gasoline. True we may pay less per gallon for it, but due to the size of our country, the overall costs of ground transportation are stunning and definetly higher than our Chinese counter-parts who have the option of using a mag-train, therefore negating the rise in oil.

I do think this is a positive trend and overall good news so keep your chin up 99er's!