The Capital Job, Part 5

State unemployment numbers are out for January, and they are pretty grim.

Joblessness in five states—California (12.5 percent), South Carolina (12.6 percent) , Florida (11.9 percent), Georgia (10.4 percent) and North Carolina (11.1 percent)—hit a record high. The District of Columbia, at 12.0 percent, also reached a record high.

In all, 30 states and the District of Columbia saw their rates increase in January over the previous month. Nine states reported a decrease and 11 states had no change in their unemployment, according to the Labor Department. 

Fewer states showed an increase in their unemployment rate in January compared to December, when 43 states showed an increase in jobless rates. 

"It shows that the labor market is virtually frozen," said Nick Colas, chief market strategist at the ConvergEx Group. Although the data is from January, he said that "there has not been any dramatic change in these past six weeks."

Unfortunately, a frozen job market right now means we're in real trouble. We need to be generating 125k jobs a month just to break even, meaning we need to actually be creating twice that to make any sort of dent in the missing 8 million jobs since Dec. 2007.

The unemployment rate will take a very long time to go down, even with Obama trying to fix it.  And right now we're at the point where we're still bleeding jobs.  The Senate has finally passed their version of the House's $154 billion jobs bill, but the Senate version is closer to only $140 billion, so it's going to have to be worked out in conference.  That will take time, and right now a lot of Americans just simply don't have time on their side.

We'll see if this works or not.  I'm thinking that it will help, but frankly what we really need is the return of the Public Works Administration.