The new job data is out and it was so bad it caused a 300+ point drop in the Dow Jones. The market is now down over 10% since late April. Robert Reich is now saying what I thought would happen: we are headed into a double dip recession. Basically, only 431,000 jobs were created, but that itself is very deceiving.

Hey, you gotta do what you gotta do to get a job in a down economy:

Or perhaps rewriting the past would be a better way to put it. The Obama administration claims its saved between 2.2 and 2.8 million jobs with the stimulus. However, the folks at Biggovernment.com compared the Obama administration’s claims about jobs saved/created to what was said before the stimulus. This would seem like fuzzy math to me:

Perhaps losing 36,000 jobs is better than expected, or even a sign of a recovery (which I doubt), but at best it’s a sign that things aren’t as bad as they were, not good news.

Here’s the problem: the United States has lost approximately 3.3 million jobs since the stimulus package was passed. Unemployment has risen from 7.6% to over 10%. Furthermore, if you include people who are underemployed (working part-time even though they’d prefer to work full-time) or have simply given up on finding a job, unemployment is closer to 20%. So how, exactly, does Obama know he’s saved 640,000 or a million jobs or whatever it is? The exact methodology is difficult to ascertain, but the best explanation I can come up with is an extremely creative imagination.