My colleague Matthew Yglesias will have much more about the BLS numbers, but there’s a depressing sidebar in the revisions.
March payrolls grew by an upwardly revised 154,000 from an initially reported 120,000, and February payrolls posted a gain of 259,000, compared with an earlier estimate of 240,000.
The upward revisions help draw a nice, clean, downward angle in job growth. This is all before France ousts Sarkozy and spooks the markets in a new, hard-to-guess manner.
One other point: Public sector employment has fallen by around 607,000 jobs since January 2009. The president’s opponents have an enviable twofer each month – they’re for cutting the bloated public sector rolls, but they also get to count the vanished jobs as proof that Obama Isn’t Working. (Remember the “President Zero” jobs report? Growth was only zero if you counted the public sector loss.)
