The Bureau of Labor Statistics has issued a revision of the jobs picture through March of this year. And they found 386,000 net additional jobs. And yes, that’s quite a few jobs. In fact, the total number of additional private sector jobs was 453,000 but they’re counterbalanced by a decrease of 67,000 government jobs.
One thing to note is that this apparently puts President Obama past the net jobs creator threshold — a meaningless economic statistic but one that carries some political weight and one I suspect we’ll start hearing on the campaign trail.
But what really strikes me is this. It’s been something of a mystery across the political spectrum why President Obama has been able to weather the soft economy as well as he has. There are many factors — context of the Great Recession, personal favorability of the man himself, etc. But if this sort of upward revision continues for the numbers in the summer and fall of 2012 it may turn out that there’s another explanation: that the economy was in at least somewhat better shape than we thought and this was showing up in the political numbers more clearly than in the first draft economic data.
