Jobless Rate, U.s. Economy | featured news

In the quarter-century that Armentha Cruise has run her Silver Spring staffing firm, the nation has made strides toward racial equality. Voters have twice elected a black president, African Americans shine among Hollywood’s brightest stars, and the number of blacks who graduate from college has tripled.

In the wake of the controversial 7.8% unemployment rate reported by the U.S. Labor Department earlier this month, Gallup today said that its nonseasonally adjusted rate fell from 7.9% at the end of September to 7.3% in mid-October. That is a new low since Gallup began collecting employment data in January 2010.

Romney senior adviser Ed Gillespie brushed past the latest conspiracy theory Sunday, focusing instead on the fact that the unemployment rate remains at a high 7.8%.

When conspiracists suggested Friday that the Obama administration had engineered a sharp drop in unemployment to aid President Barack Obama's re-election, the response was swift. Career government officials, economists and even some Mitt Romney supporters issued a collective sigh. The staffers who compute the U.S. unemployment rate work in an agency of the Labor Department. Officials who have overseen the work say it's prepared under tight security with no White House input or supervision.

For Mitt Romney, it was the number that proved everything. Since the very first speech of his campaign, the Republican candidate has used a simple figure to bolster his argument that President Obama couldn’t fix the U.S. economy: 8 percent.

Mitt Romney said the July report showing an 8.3% jobless rate is a 'hammer blow' to the middle class. The U.S. economy added 163,000 jobs in July, according to a government report released today, but the unemployment rate rose to 8.3%.