According to statistics released April 2, the U.S. added 162,000 jobs in March; the third month running that jobs were added instead of lost (January and February saw very modest gains). Since 150,000 new jobs per month is the magic number that signals a healthy economy (why I’m not sure, seeing as how we’re at least 15 million jobs in the hole since late 2008), you’d expect a lot of jubiliation about this development.

Yay, huzzah, the recession is over!

It certainly is good to see positive growth. But even the President cautioned against getting too excited about these numbers, noting that at least 48,000 of the March jobs are temporary Census positions.

Robert Reich (a Clinton economist and hardly a right wing extremist), says the real number of Census jobs included in that March figure is more like 100,000 to 140,000—48,000 is pretty much the minimum estimate. So that leaves a few new health care jobs added, a few new manufacturing jobs, a sprinkle of service sector jobs (well would you like fries with that?), and real growth in temporary jobs—not just with the Census, but with temp agencies as well.

If you want to do temp work, this may be your moment.

(And temp work is not all bad, but that’s a post for another day.)

Darker statistics showed the percentage of unemployed Americans out of work six months or longer climbing to over 44%, and the number of underemployed workers also steadily climbing.

15 million jobs is a staggering number no matter how you spin the information, and that’s an optimistic number when you take statistical spin and games into account (see video clip above). If 160,000 real new jobs were added every single month in the U.S. from now onward, it would take just under 94 months or nearly EIGHT YEARS to get everyone who wants to work back to work.

Yikes.

I’m not bringing this up so I can beat up on President Obama or bring everybody down or cast a nasty dark shadow over Passover and Easter, I’m bringing it up because I have a feeling that most of you folks out there are as sick of false optimism as I am. How many of you got new jobs in March?

Raise your hands.

Now, how many of those jobs involve french fries or a hairnet?

The American people are not babies. Our ancestors came here on slave ships and prison ships and to escape famine and oppression in other nations. We survived an economic Depression in the 1930s and a Civil War in the 1860s. Some of our great-great-grandparents crossed the Rocky Mountains on foot. So please, please, please U.S. government (and U.S. media), stop blowing smoke up our collective asses every time three more people go out and buy new toasters or a weekend suppy of Peeps.

The much touted ‘consumer economy’ was an artifact of easy credit and massive private debt and most ordinary people know this, but our government seems not to know this. The ‘consumer economy’ came about in large measure because wages stagnated while costs rose, and banks allowed working people to tap their home equity and use credit cards to fill in the gaps. Finance replaced manufacturing while a wave of frantic deregulation allowed finance to pump itself up even larger. Now it’s a monster. It runs us.

Working people ‘get’ that. We were there when it happened. We saw our money vanish up close and personal, and guess what? It’s still gone.

You’d never know it from reading the papers or watching the news though. The press and the government keep talking as if the consumer economy will magically come roaring back any moment now. Apparently, soon, very soon, all of us unemployed, skittish, paycheck-to-paycheck chumps are going to wake up with a sudden killer craving for widgets and cheap shoes, and on that happy day nothing, I mean NOTHING will be able to stop us from rushing out to spend, spend, spend lots and lots of money we don’t even sort of have.

That’s what the pundits and experts seem to believe anyway. That’s the unspoken assumption behind all the faux analysis and the constantly posed news questions. “Are consumers starting to spend yet? How are consumers feeling this month? This week? Today? How about now? How about now?”

Hey I’m a PERSON not a consumer. Hello? And I’m broke. And so are all my friends and most of my relatives and most of their friends and their relatives. And the last three jobs I had sucked. And now I can’t buy a job, not even one that requires the aquisition of a dumb hat and polyester uniform to absorb grease.

So can we PLEASE stop anxiously taking our consumer temperature every 30 days or so to see if we are starting to spend insane amounts of money on cheap crap from China again? Can we just please STOP talking about ‘consumer confidence’ and throwing bogus statistics into a blender and hitting ‘puree’ until the slush that comes out is almost sorta kinda palatable but not really?

Instead, can we have a real conversation about who we are and where we want to go as a nation? About where new jobs will come from, given that the old jobs are not coming back? In fact, is it remotely possible that we are all worth something no matter what we are ‘worth’, whether we have a ‘job’ our not?

The world doesn’t need us to consume things anymore. China and India and Mexico can sell their wares anywhere now—to themselves, to each other, to Europe, to the Middle East. So banking on the consumer economy to come roaring back is a very bad bet. We don’t have money, we can’t get credit, and the rest of the world doesn’t need us the way they once did.

In short, American consumers are obsolete, and thank God! A quick look at the number on the scale will tell 66% of us that we’ve consumed much too much already, thank you. We don’t need to consume again and consume more, we need to decide who we are and start doing things that matter. We aren’t the world’s factory anymore. We aren’t the people who buy up all the world’s crappy stuff. We aren’t even very good bankers and the world is more than a little honked off at us on that score, for good reason.

So who are we?

That’s a question I’d like to see discussed more seriously. Or at all.

No we don’t have many jobs here in the U.S. right now. But work? We have plenty of work.

I’m ready to get started, how about you?