The new national jobless numbers came out Friday morning with the unemployment rate falling from 9.9 percent to 9.7 percent—thanks, in large part, to the 2010 Census that hired 411,000 temporary workers.
The economy seems to be slowly recovering; manufacturing, mining, and temporary service firms added jobs in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Personal income and disposable income increased for the month of April, and the average hourly wage rose ever so slightly. My colleague Daniel Gross wrote in early April that such gains portended great things for the future of the American economy, calling the doom-and-gloom chatter “grossly exaggerated.”