U.S. jobs report is a ray of hope

In recent months, critics of the Obama administration have lambasted the president’s $787 billion stimulus plan, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed in February. Sure, they say, the stock market is soaring and the real-estate market is steadily climbing. But America is still shedding jobs. Ergo, the stimulus must have failed.

Since August, critics have repeated the charge again and again, until even a number of Obama’s supporters have come to believe it. Never mind that the stimulus plan is still just nine months old. Obama’s detractors, and even a number of his supporters, demand a swift, 180-degree turnaround in an economy that was wrecked by loose regulation and profligate spending over the course of five years.

I hope the U.S. Department of Labor’s jobs report for November, issued on Dec. 4, will at last put a stop to the oft-repeated refrain that the stimulus has failed, if not among the anti-Obama crowd, then at the least among the president’s allies. According to the report, the unemployment rate dropped from 10.2 to 10 percent last month. The department reported in its Employment Situation Summary that the nation lost 11,000 jobs in November, the smallest monthly employment decrease since December 2007, when the recession began.

Last month, there were job losses in the manufacturing, construction and information sectors, but gains in temporary help services and health care more than made up for the decreases. Economists had predicted that we would shed another 130,000 jobs in November, so the report came as a pleasant surprise to most everyone — except, perhaps, the naysayers.

I’m not sure why the jobs report came as such a surprise. From January to March this year, an average of 650,000 Americans per month filed new claims for unemployment benefits, according to the Department of Labor. That figure has steadily declined since March, the first month that stimulus money became available, to 457,000 claims in November.