Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs In February

The American economy gained 20,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at -70,000 jobs. The unemployment rate declined to 3.8 percent.

As bad as this looks, the underlying numbers are a little more comforting. The number of employed people went up by 255,000 and the number of unemployed went down by 300,000. On the other hand, nearly 200,000 people dropped out of the labor force, which is a pretty high number. The labor participation rate stayed steady.

Wages were a mixed story. The hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory workers went up at an annualized rate of 4.3 percent, which comes to about 2.8 percent when you account for inflation. However, weekly earnings went down by 3.1 percent, which comes -4.6 percent when you account for inflation.

I don’t really know how to react to all this. The raw jobs picture is obviously terrible, but everything else—the rise in employment, the participation rate, wages for blue-collar workers—looks pretty good. I’m tentatively going to say that I think the jobs number is a blip and we’ll return to decent job growth next month. But my confidence in saying this is fairly low.

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We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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