(h/t Yglesias) President Obama has now broken even on the jobs creation front. BLS has revised previous numbers to show that the economy was a lot stronger in the first quarter (through March) than previously thought. BLS statement is here. Here is the key graf:
Each year, the Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey employment estimates are benchmarked to comprehensive counts of employment for the month of March. These counts are derived from state unemployment insurance (UI) tax records that nearly all employers are required to file. For National CES employment series, the annual benchmark revisions over the last 10 years have averaged plus or minus three-tenths of one percent of Total nonfarm employment. The preliminary estimate of the benchmark revision indicates an upward adjustment to March 2012 Total nonfarm employment of 386,000 (0.3 percent).
9:27 AM PT: Updated with info to show affect on unemployment rate.
Recent BLS statement has total unemployed at 12.5 million (link) Cilvilian labor force is 154.6 million. 386,000 divided by that is .0024, or .24%, which would put the unemployment number at 7.9 %.
9:36 AM PT: 2nd update: Just to make it clear, this means that President Obama now has net jobs creation. More people are employed than when he took office.
10:04 AM PT: As some have noted, the unemployment rate is officially based on household surveys. But I just want to point out that the number of jobs created relative to the total number of people in the labor force is a legitimate point of discussion.