ECONOMY | September 27, 2012, 7:42 p.m. ET
Obama Trumpets Revised Job Data
By BEN CASSELMAN and COLLEEN MCCAIN NELSON
For the first time since President Barack Obama's inauguration, the number of jobs in the U.S. economy is higher than it was when he took office.
U.S. employers added almost 400,000 more jobs than had been previously estimated in the 12 months ended in March, the Labor Department said Thursday. The revision helped push the overall job total into positive territory since Mr. Obama's inauguration in January 2009.
The new data don't alter the underlying narrative of a painfully slow recovery in the job market and an economy still struggling. The U.S. still has more than 4 million fewer jobs than before the recession began in December 2007, and the new data don't affect the unemployment rate, which remains at 8.1%. Nor do the revisions reverse the trend of a slowdown in hiring since March.
Nonetheless, the new numbers mark a landmark of sorts in the labor market's slow recovery, completing a trajectory of job losses and gains within the president's first term that resembles a deep U-shaped curve.
For the overall economy, the revision is unremarkable, the equivalent of an extra 32,000 jobs a month. That would be enough to make some bad months look slightly less bad, and some good months look even better. All told, the jobs added by the revision represent three tenths of 1% of the total working population, exactly the size of the average annual revision over the past 10 years.
At the same time, the change comes less than six weeks before the presidential election and is fraught with political overtones, which both sides are likely to try to use to their advantage at next week's first presidential debate.
The White House welcomed the news on Thursday. "While we are still rebuilding our economy and working to recover from the worst crisis since the Great Depression, we are making progress," Alan Krueger, chairman of Mr. Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, wrote on the White House's blog.
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