Unemployment is actually still in double digits.   Those temporary US census jobs don't count because they will be finished in a few weeks.

For the umpteenth time, we need a 21st century New Deal.

As Eric Lotke writes at Our Future blog: "Nonfarm employment grew by 431,000 last month. That’s nice, but 411,000 of those new hires were temporary employees for the 2010 Census. But for that Census hiring, unemployment would have ticked all the way back up to 10 percent. Government is the only functioning sector of the economy.

"Here’s a tip. People need work and there’s work to do. Put them together.

"We can start by rebuilding our infrastructure. One in four bridges in the United States is “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.” One in three public schools is in condition bad enough “to interfere with the delivery of instruction.” Every two minutes a significant water line bursts somewhere in America. There’s plenty of work to do.

"FDR put people to work to fight the depression. World War Two occasioned the greatest public mobilization of human resources in American history. What ails us today is not just failure of imagination, it’s a failure to learn high school history. Fix the schools, build the bridges, lay the track. Make the parts in America. Put us to work! Every billion dollars spent on infrastructure is estimated to create 18,000 jobs.

"Yes, it costs money in the short term and yes our deficits are already high. But cutting is not the solution. The solution is growth. Put people to work. Turn them into back (sic) taxpayers, shoppers and builders. Reproduce the self-perpetuating cycle of economic success that made America great. That’s how we solved the (larger) deficits after World War Two. That’s how we can solve the (smaller) deficits today.

"It’s obvious and it’s politically popular, yet we can’t take even small steps in the right direction. State and local governments are going in the wrong direction, cutting back services and laying off school teachers to balance their budgets. We need Uncle Sam to step in, but he’s running scared. He worships at the altar of deficits not jobs."