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Austan Goolsbee, the HuffingtonPost‘s Peter Goodman reports,

…is clearly tired of hearing talk about the supposedly desperate state of the American economy.

On the heels of the latest government snapshot of the labor market, which showed the economy gaining a paltry number of jobs in May while the unemployment rate climbed to 9.1 percent, Goolsbee pushed back with vehemence at the suggestion that the current state of play amounts to a crisis. He insisted that the economy is improving, even if there is still a slog to come.

“We do not have a sense of panic from one month’s jobs numbers, nor should we be having a sense of panic in general,” Goolsbee said, speaking to a gathering of personal finance writers and editors at the White House on Wednesday. “Over the last six months, we have had added a million jobs in the private sector, which the president’s the first to say ‘That’s not enough. We’ve got to do more, and get that higher.’ But I really do not think that you take a variable series like the monthly job numbers, you don’t want to overreact to one month’s numbers that are different from what has been the trend.”

…

He sought refuge in a paperback book with a black cover, the administration’s official economic forecast, released early this year. It showed that the economy would average 9.3 percent unemployment this year. Here it is, only June, and we can celebrate the fact that we have already gotten below that number.

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