A brightening jobs picture

In a sign that the economic recovery may be gaining momentum, the U.S. added 200,000 jobs in December, pushing the unemployment rate down to 8.5 percent, its lowest level since February 2009. It was the sixth month in a row that the Labor Department reported the creation of at least 100,000 jobs, and the gains spanned such sectors as transportation, manufacturing, and even construction. But economists warned that the U.S. still faces tough economic headwinds. President Obama, who hopes a reinvigorated economy will improve his re-election chances, expressed cautious optimism. “The economy is moving in the right direction,” he said. But “there are a lot of people that are still hurting out there.”

File this report “under ‘unmitigated good news,’” said Felix Salmon in Reuters.com. There’s much to cheer: Average wages increased, public-sector layoffs slowed, and the broadest measure of unemployment, which includes people who aren’t currently looking for work, fell to a three-year low. Even though the stubborn problem of long-term joblessness remains, “I’m not worried about an economy falling below stall speed anymore.”

But can it last? asked Bloomberg.com in an editorial. We’ve had a run of good economic news—manufacturing is expanding, auto sales and consumer confidence are up—but “any sense of security is misbegotten.” The U.S. economy still isn’t growing fast enough to weather fallout from “Europe’s festering debt crisis or a hard landing in China.” At this rate of job creation, we won’t reach prerecession employment levels until 2015.

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The headline numbers also don’t capture America’s unemployment divide, said Zachary Karabell in TheDailyBeast.com. There’s no real crisis for people with college degrees, or for women in service industries, but unemployment for minorities and men with only a high school education remains chronically high. We now have an underclass of millions who may never find permanent, well-paying work, and Washington appears incapable of doing much about it. That makes our “employment conundrum that much more intractable.”