In economic news, the nation’s workers received more devastating news on Friday. Eighty-five thousand jobs were lost last month, a far higher number than analysts had projected. The official unemployment rate remained at ten percent, but that was only because 661,000 people were not counted as unemployed because they had not looked for a job in the four weeks preceding the December survey. If those people had been included in the tally, the jobless rate would have been closer to 10.4 percent. On Friday, President Obama acknowledged the latest job numbers were discouraging.

President Obama: “The jobs numbers that were released by the Labor Department this morning are a reminder that the road to recovery is never straight and that we have to continue to work every single day to get our economy moving again. For most Americans, and for me, that means jobs. It means whether we are putting people back to work.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports just 80 percent of men between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four were employed in December. That’s the lowest figure ever recorded. The economy has shed more than 7.2 million jobs since the recession started in December 2007.