Many economists don't worry about this, saying that this will be a jobless recovery, which we've experienced before. Other economists are quite concerned about the number of jobs lost during the recession which was a total of 8 million. Many feel that all of those 8 million jobs will never be brought back due to increased productivity of the U.S. work force. On top of this, we need to add new jobs just to keep up with the growing population. If this is true, we need to add a significant number of jobs each month to make up for the job losses during the recession and to account for growing population numbers. So far this isn't happening.

How does the jobs data look? Not so good. The good news is that, in May 2010, the unemployment rate fell from 9.9% in April to 9.7% as the country added 411,000 jobs. The bad news is that almost all of those jobs were Federal Government Census jobs. The private sector added only 41,000 jobs instead of meeting the estimates of close to 180,000 jobs. Some say not to worry about this because this recovery is going to be long and slow and unemployment will be high for awhile. Others point to this as a sign of a possible double-dip recession.

On the up side, manufacturers added 29,000 of those private sector jobs last month and wages as well as hours worked grew. However, the long-term unemployed remains at about 6.7 million people.