Last week (February 1, 2013), the – US Bureau of Labor Statistics – released their latest – Employment Situation – January 2013 – which showed that total “nonfarm payroll employment increased by 157,000 in January, and the unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 7.9 percent”. The question is whether that is a good outcome or not in the scheme of things. The answer is that it remains a fairly bleak outcome especially when we consider the data more deeply. The economy is not growing fast enough to absorb the backlog of workers who were made unemployed in the downturn. There is massive waste now being endured by the economy and disproportionately being borne by the most disadvantaged workers in that economy. It is madness for the politicians to argue about debt ceilings and the rest of the irrelevancies when there is this much waste being created.