>>>The economy needs 200k per WEEK just to stay even. That 103k for the month is short by about 700k.
I think your figures are off by a considerable amount. Even in 2005, the best year for jobs growth in the last decade, the monthly change in payrolls averaged 208,000. By your figures, we would have been 600,000 short per month. Yet the unemployment rate declined through the year from 5.3% to 4.9%.
Stuart Varney said on FoxNews about a year ago that the economy would need to be creating 200k jobs per week just to stay even.
At 400k new jobless per WEEK, that is 1.6 million new unemployed per month. 100k new jobs per MONTH isn’t going to make a dent in that.