Not getting better

The latest job numbers are not good at all.

WASHINGTON - New claims for unemployment benefits jumped last week to a 16-year high, the Labor Department said Thursday, providing more evidence of a rapidly weakening job market expected to get even worse next year.

The government said new applications for jobless benefits rose to a seasonally adjusted 542,000 from a downwardly revised figure of 515,000 in the previous week. That’s much higher than Wall Street economists’ expectations of 505,000, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters.

That is also the highest level of claims since July 1992, the department said, when the U.S. economy was coming out of a recession.

Numbers like this reinforce the idea that the faltering economy needs a big boost in government spending to stimulate demand. Coincidentally, the nation faces a humongous backlog of infrastructure repairs and improvements. Two birds, one stone – let’s hope that a new President and Congress will recognize the opportunity to do some real good rather than just piss the money away on Bridges to Nowhere and the like.