No president since FDR has been re-elected when the unemployment rate on Election Day topped 7.2 percent, which means President Obama has a heavy hill to climb come next November.
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Today the Labor department revealed that the U.S. unemployment rate fell last month to 8.6 percent, down from 9 percent in October. It’s lowest since March 2009.
Employers stepped up, hiring in the last quarter in response to the slowly improving economy.
Still, 13.3 million Americans remain unemployed. And a key reason the unemployment rate fell so much was because roughly 315,000 people had given up looking for work and were no longer counted as unemployed.
Breaking it down by the numbers:
Employers added 120,000 jobs last month. And the previous two months were revised up to show that 72,000 more jobs added – the fourth straight month that the government has revised prior months higher.
Private employers added a net gain of 140,000 jobs in November. But governments shed 20,000 jobs, mostly at the local and state level. Governments at all levels have shed nearly a half-million jobs in the past year.
We still have a long way to go, however the numbers prove encouraging.
SOURCE: AP
