When Obama took office we were shedding jobs at a rate of nearly 1,000,000 per month. Now we are once again gaining jobs. Sure it will take awahile to get back to where we were before Bush trashed the economy, but we are on the right path. Thank you Obama!

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The nation's economy posted its largest job gain in three years in March, while the unemployment rate remained at 9.7 percent for the third straight month.

The increase in payrolls is the latest sign that the economic recovery is gaining momentum and healing in the job market is beginning. Still, the healing is likely to be slow, and most economists don't expect new hiring to be fast enough this year to rapidly reduce the unemployment rate.

The Labor Department said employers added 162,000 jobs in March, the most since the recession began but below analysts' expectations of 190,000. The total includes 48,000 temporary workers hired for the U.S. Census, also fewer than many economists forecast.

Private employers added 123,000 jobs, the most since May 2007.

"It's just the beginning of a rise in private hiring that will help sustain the recovery," said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group. "They're not big numbers, but they're welcome numbers."

Still, there are 15 million Americans out of work, roughly double the total before the recession began in December 2007. More Americans entered the work force last month, which prevented the increase in jobs from reducing the unemployment rate.

Only fools believe that minimal short term gains brought about by artificial monetary creation won't have long term affects on the economy and the value of the currency.

.................laffin,.............................next

That's one big IF KK.

Any time you pump trillions into an economy your are going to see short term gains. There is nothing that is all that spectacular about creating trillions of dollars out of thin air and buying toxic assets from the largerst banks and placing them in the hands of the taxpayer. It's the long term effects of the monetary creation that is so worrisome.

I'd be real hesitant to be trumpeting any short term gains in this day and age. We've got a LONG way to go before we are out of the woods.

Bush came up with the bailout because he didn't want to do to his business buddies what he had done to New Orleans...

...or was it that he didn't want to be remembered as the next Herbert Hoover?

I'll take good policy decisions over a bit of good short term news anyday of the week. Kicking the can down the road will get us right back to what got us here in the first place.

If you're an instant gratification type of fellow than this is good news for you. If you have enough foresight to see down the road then you are none to pleased.

I don't recall you ripping on the Bush Admin for creating the biggest government that ever existed.

Or is big government only bad when Democrats have control?

Is it kinda like when deficit spending was good under Reagan, but bad under Obama?

Just wondering why the viewpoint seems to change as the party in control changes.

I love Obama now...thanks Dave for helping me see the light...

Right on grizz!

So... you're gonna add him to the list of Indian tribes, poor people, Christine Gregoire and all of the other things you used to hate... but now love huh?

I thought this cast might get a few srtrikes. Damn I wish fishing was always this good.

Happy Easter all.

That's exactly what Herbert Hoover said in the Winter of 1929 Chuck... and we all know how well that worked out.

Hoover did nothing huh?

Perhaps you should be a little sharper on your history Quatre Sel. Or maybe just not regurgitate what you hear from revisionists on the nightly news.

From chapter 7 of "America's Great Depression" by Murray Rothbard.

"Laissez-faire was, roughly, the traditional policy in American depressions before 1929. The laissez-faire precedent was set in America's first great depression, 1819, when the federal government's only act was to ease terms of payment for its own land debtors. President Van Buren also set a staunch laissez-faire course, in the Panic of 1837. Subsequent federal governments followed a similar path, the chief sinners being state governments, which periodically permitted insolvent banks to continue in operation without paying their obligations.[1] In the 1920–1921 depression, government intervened to a greater extent, but wage rates were permitted to fall, and government expenditures and taxes were reduced. And this depression was over in one year – in what Dr. Benjamin M. Anderson has called "our last natural recovery to full employment."

Laissez-faire, then, was the policy dictated both by sound theory and by historical precedent. But in 1929, the sound course was rudely brushed aside. Led by President Hoover, the government embarked on what Anderson has accurately called the "Hoover New Deal." For if we define "New Deal" as an antidepression program marked by extensive governmental economic planning and intervention – including bolstering of wage rates and prices, expansion of credit, propping up of weak firms, and increased government spending (e.g., subsidies to unemployment and public works) – Herbert Clark Hoover must be considered the founder of the New Deal in America. Hoover, from the very start of the depression, set his course unerringly toward the violation of all the laissez-faire canons. As a consequence, he left office with the economy at the depths of an unprecedented depression, with no recovery in sight after three and a half years, and with unemployment at the terrible and unprecedented rate of 25 percent of the labor force.

Hoover's role as founder of a revolutionary program of government planning to combat depression has been unjustly neglected by historians. Franklin D. Roosevelt, in large part, merely elaborated the policies laid down by his predecessor. To scoff at Hoover's tragic failure to cure the depression as a typical example of laissez-faire is drastically to misread the historical record. The Hoover rout must be set down as a failure of government planning and not of the free market. To portray the interventionist efforts of the Hoover administration to cure the depression, we may quote Hoover's own summary of his program, during his presidential campaign in the fall of 1932:

We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. Instead we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. We put it into action.... No government in Washington has hitherto considered that it held so broad a responsibility for leadership in such times.... For the first time in the history of depression, dividends, profits, and the cost of living, have been reduced before wages have suffered.... They were maintained until the cost of living had decreased and the profits had practically vanished. They are now the highest real wages in the world.

Creating new jobs and giving to the whole system a new breath of life; nothing has ever been devised in our history which has done more for ... "the common run of men and women." Some of the reactionary economists urged that we should allow the liquidation to take its course until we had found bottom.... We determined that we would not follow the advice of the bitter-end liquidationists and see the whole body of debtors of the United States brought to bankruptcy and the savings of our people brought to destruction."

Now we all know where Hoover and Roosevelt's policies led the nation for the next 15 years.

Still want to stand by the claim that Hoover was a non-interventionist in the economy??????

Too bad Wa. got one of the lowest per capita pieces of the pie. But I guess Obama doesn't need to buy any votes here......................

Not like we could use the money for ferries or anything, "OLYMPIA — Washington State Ferries on Tuesday got shut out of $60 million in federal stimulus money to build ferries and terminals, angering the U.S. senator who inserted those dollars in the massive economic recovery package.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., spoke with U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood shortly after learning the nation’s largest ferry system wouldn’t get any of the funds."

Holy schnikies Stink! You sure read a lot into just a little!

Must be that hidden wingnut in you that comes out from time to time.

I didn't say Hoover did NOTHING... but the measures he did take obviously were ineffective and ultimately led to FDR'S election 3 YEARS later.

Revisionst history... huh? You c&p some opinion piece and present it as hard fact? If Hoover was doing so much... what happened?

C'mon man, who's REALLY the talking points regurgitator here.

Hey, maybe it was really minorities borrowin' money that caused the Great Depression too like it did the recent housing market collapse?

FDR was in the same boat then that Obama is in now Hank. Republicans f#ck this country to the brink of ruin... and a Democrat has to come along and fix things.

One can argue forever about how much FDRs and Obamas efforts helped, but there is no denying the Rs fugged things up badly and left them with the chore of cleaning it up.

Heck of a job George.

I realize you didn't say Hoover did nothing. That's just the common consensus used by leftoids to justify FDR's economic intervention during the depression,.....and something you eluded to in your post to Chuck.

You're exactly right, the measures and interventionist actions he took were completely ineffective, as were FDR's. If FDR's policies were so effective why was the country was still in depression until around 1944?

What I posted was hardly some Op Ed. Rothbard is recognized by many economists as a legitimate authority on the Great Depression. By your response I gather you have no idea who he was and I'm not entirely suprised. On top of that the last two paragraphs were Hoover's own words. That's fact Quatre Sel, the historical record is there if you care to read, which I gather you don't have the patience for.. As KK would say,.....I presented the facts, your relationship with those facts are entirely up to you

I also see your penchant for laziness when it comes to reading has appeared in the form of your refusal to read about my explanations on the mortgage and housing collapse in prior threads. As I explained to you before, blame can't be placed on those who failed to meet their obligations. They were doomed to fail from the beginning.

Try again,........and this time try reading something before you come back and try to defend your ignorance.

Tisk, tisk,........ so much education to do and so little time.

It's not the job of the gubmint to run the economy. Unless of course you can point that out to me somewhere in the Constitution,......maybe I missed that part.

Gubmint uphold the rule of law? Yes. Run the economy,.....maybe in Cuba, not here.

Gosh, I thought that the actions by our gubmint leaders, taxation, spending, etc. could effect the economy. Please explain why that is not so.

Please re-read that Dave. All of those things you mentioned do indeed affect the economy. Specifically, many of those things are the root causes of our problems. No where did I say that gubmint actions do not affect the economy. The gubmint's job in the economy is to protect the sanctity of contracts and to enforce the rule of law. Not to be purchasing bank assets, controlling prices, wages, providing purchase incentives, exc. All of those actions have unintended consequences when using someone else's money.

Glad to see that I've graduated to sophmore year

Your predictable manner in pointing to extremes is almost comical at times, if you didn't rely on it for every response.

I don't recall advocating anarchy anywhere in my post.

,..............and I'm the one with the preoccupation