Unemployment rates rise as ninety eight thousand employees lose their jobs in March. The official tally is supposed to be eighty thousand but that takes into account the gains made by labor in education, health care, leisure and government hiring.? A new look at the job market released by the Labor Department Friday underscores the damage that is causing the crises in our economy. Housing, credit and the financial sectors have inflicted a huge set back to our economy. “The labor market has indeed turned south,” said Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisers. “That was the one last bastions of hope to stay out of a recession. Now the question is how deep and how long will it last?” To me the numbers just don’t add up. One says we lost 98,000 jobs another says 80,000 and one more totals up to 173,000. Add them up for yourself. In March, construction companies cut 51,000 jobs, factories eliminated 48,000 positions, retailers cut payrolls by more than 12,000. Professional and businesses services lost 35,000 jobs and temporary help firms cut nearly 22,000 jobs. Financial firms chopped 5,000 jobs. Either someone can’t count or someone is lying to mislead the country as to how bad this recession is. They now say we have 7.8 million people unemployed. that is 5.1%, not real high by historical standards but still the highest in the past 2 years. Actually our economy has been steadily going south since we got into the war. Boat loads of money are leaving our coffers, and the investors that jump start our economy are naturally concerned ?by this. All of us should be. Government borrowing money from foreign investors to prop up our outlandish spending and companies gaining financial incentives and tax breaks to leave our shores can’t do the average citizen any good and if they have lost their jobs to outsourcing like that how can they pay taxes and purchases goods to keep our economy going? Free trade may be all well and good if everything was on the same playing field. We can not compete with countries that use next to nothing pay, child labor or follow environmental and safety concerns that we must meet with our workers. Plus we give most favored nation status to a country that actively is engaging in corporate espionage, and routinely is accused of human rights violations against its own citizens. When we fought WWII we had a huge advantage over the Germans and Japanese and that was our manufacturing base. We could build ships faster than they could sink them. We could build airplanes faster than they could be shot up beyond repair or shot down. We could build anything and we could do it on a grand scale. Now we are outsourcing all those jobs and factories overseas. What would happen if we were embroiled in another war of global proportions? Where would we get the materials that would be needed? Hopefully that will never happen but if it did we would be crippled in that respect and we are crippling our economy today as more and more workers are added to the growing list of those who have lost their jobs to plant closings and moving away. Hopefully our next President will work with Congress to help insure that we no longer subsidize companies moving from the U.S. to other countries and give those tax breaks to companies that are investing in American plants and jobs. I can’t see this happening under a Republican led Congress or White House.