Graph of the day: Jobs

Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly "graphs monthly job losses since the start of the Great Recession." Red is under the Bush administration and blue is under the Obama administration.

You can see from that last blue bar that nonfarm payrolls have surged, as the New York Times reported:

Employers added 162,000 jobs last month, and employment numbers in the previous two months were revised upward. Nationwide, the unemployment rate held steady at 9.7 percent.

To many ordinary, out-of-work Americans, the recovery may finally start to feel real.

“The key message from this report is that we’ve finally turned the corner,” said Nigel Gault, chief United States economist at IHS Global Insight. “Going forward, we should expect things to strengthen further over the rest of the year.”

Is it not both Good Friday and a good Friday?