Well, there’s a lot of ink today about the drop in the unemployment rate: down to 4.7 percent, the lowest number in four years. And, according to the reports, the number of people who have been unemployed for a long-time (and those who dropped out of the job market) has come down, too.

But, before the Administration pops a vein proclaiming its great jobs record (as a way also of distracting people from the Iraq war), there are reasons to be skeptical (I know, sometimes I sound like a party-pooper about this economy but there are just annoying facts to take into account).

First, the job creation is still pretty weak compared to the recovery of the 1990s: this “recovery” has been averaging about 189,000 jobs per month, versus more than 300,000 a month at a comparable place in the 1990s recovery.

But, second, I think we have to be much more concerned about what people are being paid for these jobs. The New York Times’ Louis Uchitelle quotes Treasury Secretay John Snow in his article about the unemployment rate:

“We’re actually in a sweet spot in the economy right now,” John W. Snow, the Treasury secretary, said in an interview with the Bloomberg news agency. He argued that the wages of ordinary workers could continue to rise, as they did last month, without forcing companies to push up prices. That can happen, he said, because of rising productivity, which means workers are paying for their own raises by increasing their output.

The problem is that wages of workers are not rising with productivity. Last Fall, I pointed out that the cost of wages to employers has been the slowest on record–even though productivity was extremely strong.

And last summer, I described the break between productivity and wages–meaning, that even though people were working their butts off, they were not getting rewarded. Here’s the key part of that article:

Recently, the Economic Policy Institute showed that productivity has grown almost three times faster than wages since 2001. During that time, 70 percent of the nation’s income growth has gone straight into corporate coffers as profits—presumably to continue to finance staggering pay and benefits for executives—a complete reversal from the previous seven business cycles when 77 percent of the overall income growth went to wages.

Uchitelle doesn’t mention any of this in his article, a major omission.

So, when the Administration and others scratch their heads and try to figure out why people are not more positive about the economic future of the country, they should understand the simple reason: real people react to their specific circumstances, not some empty government statistic reported with almost no context by the media.