The U.S. unemployment rate climbed to 10.2% in October, topping the 10% mark for the first time in 26 years, the Labor Department reported Friday. Nonfarm payrolls dropped by a seasonally adjusted 190,000 in October, bringing to total number of jobs lost in the recession to 7.3 million. It was the 22nd straight decline in payrolls….The report was worse than expected. Economists surveyed by MarketWatch were forecasting a rise in the unemployment rate to 10%, with 150,000 lost payroll jobs.

That’s the highest since 1983.
I have been posting these numbers for the last 3 or 4 months here on our blog, and they are always “worse than expected.”  When you have an economically illiterate president, Treasury Secretary, and Fed Chairman, the public is left consoling itself with an alleged “number of jobs saved” from a huge spending stimulus bill.  And what of those jobs?  As Nobel Laureate and liberal luminary Paul Krugman points out, many of them are public sector union jobs (i.e., teachers): “If you want to see the recovery act in action, visit a classroom: your local school probably would have had to fire a lot of teachers if the stimulus hadn’t been enacted.”

Ladies and gentlemen, the Obama/Biden recovery!