Megan McCardle looks at the job figures from all angles and gets at the truth of the news.
... There was a lot of worry from pundits that 117,000 jobs wasn't even enough to absorb population growth. 154,000 jobs were created in the private sector, but the government lost 37,000 jobs. So on net, it seems, we lost a little bit of ground.
However, it turns out that 23,000 of those lost government jobs were in state government, and according to the BLS almost all of those were due to Minnesota's shutdown. I'm going to assume that eventually, Minnesota restores all of those jobs, which means that we made more progress than it seems.Of course, it wasn't much progress--mostly we're just treading water. On the other hand, we're not drowning.
