MORE ECONOMIC GLOOM: Massive Jump In Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) Benefits – Up 43% In One Month!

UPDATE: More on unemployment here. And forget unemployment — note this chart of how many actual jobs there are. So while the official unemployment number seems to have leveled off, some might say that’s just, er, hiding the decline in actual employment.

And note this:

The report showed there were 929,000 “discouraged workers” who had given up looking for a job, up from 642,000 a year earlier. Chris Rupkey, an economist with Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, called the rise in discouraged workers “a simply astonishing number that borders on the frightening.”

“If they were still looking for work and counted as the unemployed, the unemployment rate would have been 10.5 percent,” he said. “This clearly isn’t your father’s recession. It is looking more like your great-grandfather’s. Brother, can you spare a dime?”

Call me crazy, but I’m beginning to think that whole “stimulus” thing has been a bust.

MORE: Unexpectedly, AP hammers Obama administration on jobless report. “Unemployment has not gotten better; it has gotten worse, and the statistics have hidden the real decline in 2009. Until now, only a few media outlets bothered to highlight the problem. The AP has finally made it clear — and that will mean a lot more attention in 2010 to the failed Porkulus legislation and the fumbled economic strategies of the Obama administration.”