The Bush Created Economic Abyss Obama Pulled America Out Of Was Deep, THIS Deep:

[econoclast]

21. Not most informative

Hi Fred. You have to keep in mind 2 things. 1). All jobs are not created equal. The total non farm payroll numbers includes both full time and part time employees. The graphic from the St Louis Fed is full-time employees only. And as a measure of economic well being I think that is a better, more informative metric. 2). The population keeps growing. We need to be adding something like 130,000 jobs a month just to keep pace with population growth. So just counting employed noses doesn't quite tell the whole story. The real question is 'in a healthy economy, given the increasing population, how many employed noses SHOULD we expect to count?'

Given 1 & 2, I prefer to look at full-time employees as a percent of population as my go-to measure of employment condition.