I am continually amazed at the way people–or at least the brain-dead traditional media–express surprise when this happens:

In the one-two punch many had long been fearing, hiring by businesses has slowed significantly while government jobs are disappearing at a record pace.

Companies added 64,000 jobs last month, after having added 93,000 jobs in August, the Labor Department reported Friday. But over all, the economy shed 95,000 nonfarm jobs in September, the result of a 159,000 decline in government jobs at all levels. Local governments in particular cut jobs at the fastest rate in almost 30 years

“We need to wake up to the fact that the end of the stimulus has really hit hard on local governments,” said Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project. “There is much more of a slide in the job market than what we really need to clearly turn around.”

The recovery that officially began in June 2009 has slowed considerably, raising concerns about the long slog the country will have to endure to dig itself out of the deepest downturn since the Great Depression. Private payrolls have been growing throughout 2009 but at a rate too sluggish to keep up with people entering the work force, and not enough to make a dent in unemployment. The jobless rate remained unchanged last month at 9.6 percent.

   There never was a recovery. I don’t care how many dry statistics elected politicians want to throw at the people in order to make it seem like things are better–it isn’t so. The recovery "officially" began perhaps for a handful of people–but for most of the people it never began. When you can’t find decent paying work and when you are forced to work for a poverty-level minimum wage, there is no meaningful concept of recovery.