Very bad news : We lost 4.8 million jobs in 2009; we lost 20 000 jobs in January and we have lost 8.4 million jobs since 2009, shed actually more since 2004. Good news : Government miscalculated job gains in November, we gained 64 000 jobs rather than the 4000 that was announced at first, and for the first time in nearly half a year, we have below 10% unemployment.

Unlike many other countries, the US, still has problems with unemployment despite having the third highest economic growth (of course India and China are better) amongst the most important economies in the world.

We are the biggest economy in the world. Some say Japan is the next biggest economy, some say China has overtaken it. Either way, our economy is bigger than both theirs combined. China grew by 10.7%, India grew by 7.5% last quarter; we grew by 5.7%. Like these countries, we should be gaining jobs.

Germany, France and the UK, all registered growth of a mere 0.1% – 0.5%. Shouldn’t these countries be the ones that are losing jobs? Why do they have very slight gains? Countries like Greece, Spain and Portugal are in crisis, and even so, they are not losing as many jobs as us (granted they are smaller than us, but we are not going through the crisis that they are going through).

Why? Why are we in this boat? Conservatives would blame left wing Keynesian economic and Liberals would blame President Bush. But so many of world’s economies are Keynesian, including China’s, why they growing? And didn’t all these countries exist when President Bush was around?

To get these answers we got to look back at the figures. Firstly, the reason for the spike in jobs in November is because of Christmas. What it suggests is that now more jobs are on temporary basis. There are about 50 000 more temporary jobs in January. Overtime has went up along with hours employed and average hourly earnings.

Whilst most would worry about the whopping nearly 80 000 jobs lost in the construction industry, I would rather focus on the shortage professionals. In the midst of so much bad economic news, why are we lacking thousands of professionals? Why can’t we create the skilled labor needed rather than having to rely on foreigners to gill in this gap? There are still large requirements in the field for IT, engineering and nursing.

In my opinion, this goes back to education. I really feel that our education system needs an overhaul. We are producing too little graduates and having too many high school dropouts. Our Colleges are the best, but not enough Americans are getting there.

President Obama has been too bothered about health care, which he has ultimately failed in delivering, to be bothered about issues such as immigration, education and the education. Does anyone here actually believe that the ACES bill would pass in the Senate? Please! This is one of the long term effects we are going to face in the future if we carry on with the status quo.

That being said, the President seems to want to throw the kitchen sink at the issue of jobs. E.g. He is right now wanting to build nuclear power plants and, very disappointingly, wanting to drill offshore for oil. So how many more promises is he going to break to whore out for jobs? Is he going to allow drilling oil in ANWR as well? Is he going to invade another country to keep people employed?

So to round up, we are having growth in economy and not jobs, because we have lost lots in construction and because we cannot take advantage of jobs that require professionals. Hopefully, all results, particularly manufacturing, carries the good trend.