Friday's employment report brought not just another big month of job growth, with the economy adding 257,000 jobs in January, but revisions to earlier months that added another 147,000. The headline unemployment rate, though, ticked up from 5.6 percent to 5.7 percent - but even that may be good news.
Why is that? Because workers who had been discouraged by the slow economy are now coming back to the labor force in huge numbers - 703,000 in January alone. So even though we're adding more jobs, the denominator used to figure the unemployment rate is growing as well.
The upshot is that the economy is the strongest it's been in a long time. We've added an average of 268,000 jobs per month over the past year, and we hadn't had a 12-month stretch that strong since 2000. The revisions to the November jobs numbers that were released on Friday mean we added 423,000 jobs in that month alone - the strongest single month for job growth since 1997.
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