Like leaves in November.

Before you believe that the drop in the unemployment rate from 6.4% to 6.2% is good news, keep in mind that drop had nothing to do with new jobs. It was driven by 470,000 people giving up on finding a job and dropping out of the workforce. From today's money.cnn.com:

U.S. job-cut announcements jumped in July to their highest level in three months, an outplacement firm said Tuesday, another sign that the longest job-market slump since World War II continues. U.S. employers announced 85,117 job cuts in July, a 43 percent jump from 59,715 in June, according to Chicago-based outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas, which publishes monthly tallies of job-cut announcements.

One troubling aspect of the report is that the size of the cuts ran counter to normal seasonal patterns. "Summer is always a slow job-cut time. Management is away, and vacations are going on," said Challenger spokesman Herb Rozoff.

The five states with the highest planned job cuts for July are Texas (9593), Massachusetts (9235), Illinois (8438), North Carolina (7963), and Washington (7892). Remember how GWB's tax cuts were going to create millions of new jobs? Of course, he didn't say where they would be created (India and China, mostly), so like the "British intelligence has learned" statement, you could argue that it's "technically" true.

Here's a tip. You want to create jobs? Try a freaking jobs program instead of another round of tax cuts, because I've begun to suspect that digging might be a sub-optimal strategy for getting out of this here hole.