Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Stating the Facts

The Labor Department released state-by-state unemployment figures yesterday, and the news was good in most states. Unfortunately, as you may have heard, New Jersey was not one of them. Only seven states had their jobless rate rise between February and March, and we were one of unfortunate few. New Jersey's final unemployment figure for March came in at 9.3 percent, up from 9.2 percent the month before.

Of course, a rise of 0.1 percentage points is hardly something to get too worried about. The good news: Only one state saw an increase of more than that. Louisiana's unemployment rate went up by 0.2, from 7.9 percent to 8.1 percent. And the long-term trend is still good - a year earlier, in March 2010, our state's unemployment rate stood at 9.7 percent.

It could be worse, of course. Nevada had the biggest percentage drop in its unemployment rate among all the states - but that just means it fell from a staggering 13.6 percent to 13.2 percent.

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