Unemployment 9% In January, ¿Y Qué?

White House numbers put the unemployment rate in January at 9%, which is still super high, but a decline over the last two months. Only 36,000 jobs were added last month and a total of 1.1 million were added in all of 2010. We’re going to need lots more than that if we’re going to get out of this recession (*cough* depression) anytime soon.

You don’t have to be Latino to be affected by this recession, but still, lots of our commentators at NewsTaco have been sharing their stories. Either they lost jobs, or haven’t been able to find jobs, they have mouths to feed or need health insurance. My own personal tussle with the recession has left me without dental insurance for just about two years and the only reason I have health insurance now is because I’m a student — that’s not evening drudging up all the anguish and hustling I had to do after getting laid off.

To put it simply, the economy sucks. Then, there’s the crazy numbers game the government is playing to make themselves, I mean us, feel better about it all. One way it’s possible, for example, to reduce unemployment rates without adding jobs is by not taking into account people who have stopped looking for work, and are therefore not counted as “unemployed,” because their benefits have run out.

Despite cooking of the books, if I can remember back to being fully employed with benefits when the economy was just about to have the rug pulled out from under it, the tune was pretty much the same as it is now: Wait until 2012. I’m hoping that 2011 is going to be a year that begins to ramp up, culminating in another election revolving around the economy, but for a different reason: We’ll be back, baby!