Unemployment Surges

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Saturday April 05, 2008 · 6:55 PM PDT

2008/04/05 · 18:55

The U.S. economy shed 80,000 jobs in March and the unemployment rate jumped to 5.1 percent, as the labor market continued to be battered by an economic slowdown.

U.S. employers have now eliminated more than 232,000 jobs in the last three months. The United States has not lost jobs for three months in a row since mid-2003, as the effects of the tech bubble's collapse and the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon were beginning to dissipate. Until January of this year, employers had added jobs for 52 consecutive months.

"Trends are awful," said Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist with the High Frequency Economics consulting firm. Factoring out the increase in government jobs, he noted, private employers dropped nearly 100,000 positions. Considering that as of the end of last year, businesses were adding an average of 45,000 jobs a month, "the turnaround has been very fast," he wrote in an analysis of the latest employment report.

Geoge Bush's final frontier of failure---the economy! Of course Bush, ever the cheerleader, thinks the economy is doing fine. John McCain, George Bush's posterior attachment, thinks the economy is doing fine and that further tax cuts for the wealthiest would help the booming economy along. I take McBush at his word.."the economy is not my strong suit"..the truth is, he has no strong suit!

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