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The only reason unemployement has come down at all is because of the massive increase in people on disability who are no longer counted as unemployed. ============================= http://www.usnews.com/opinion/artic...s-unhappy-under-obama?s_cid=related-links:TOP ... If you are on disability, you are not considered to be in the labor force either. As of April, we have added 5.5 million people to the disability rolls since the beginning of 2009, several million above the previous trend. There are now roughly 9 million people on disability. In 1992, there was one person on disability for every 35 workers. It is now about one for every 16 workers. It is hard to believe that so many people have become disabled; disability has literally become another fallback position for people out of work. If disability had stayed at the pre-recession growth rate, unemployment would be at least one percentage point higher, leading to a true unemployment rate much closer to 10 percent and perhaps significantly more.
The number of people who are no longer counted as unemployed (even though they clearly are unemployed, but have given up looking for work or have managed to get onto disability) dwarfs the number people who have found jobs. That makes the unemployment percentage number meaningless because millions of unemployed people have been "erased" from the unemployment statistics. http://www.usnews.com/opinion/artic...s-unhappy-under-obama?s_cid=related-links:TOP Fewer Americans are at work today than in April 2000, although the population has grown by 31 million since then. A worker between the ages of 50 and 61 who has been unemployed for over a year has only a 9 percent chance of finding a job in the next three months. A worker who is 62 years or older and similarly unemployed has about a 6 percent chance. And 50 percent of this year's college graduates are without jobs or are underemployed.
Nevertheless, strong job creation is good news for those who are looking for a job. Edit: it's also good news for all of us who have a job.
I'm not sure how 170k is "strong job creation" for the month. According to the Labor Department, the economy has to create an average of 150k jobs each month just to keep up with new people entering the workforce. Twenty-thousand net job creation per month is a run-rate of 240k per year which is a drop in the bucket compared to the 8.8 million jobs that were lost during the recession.