The Bad News About Your Job By Daniel Gross FROM Newsweek

"But maybe the employment data are much worse than they seem. In the past year, the two key measures of employment-the unemployment rate and the payroll jobs figure-have been poor but not awful. The unemployment rate has risen from 4.5 percent a year ago to 6.1 percent. And in the first nine months, 760,000 payroll jobs were lost. This is unwelcome but not catastrophic. So why do things feel so bad? It's not because, as Phil Gramm suggested, we're a nation of whiners. And it's not a matter of columnists and spin doctors shading the numbers to make things look worse."