I don’t want to be a downer. Really. I’d like to be constantly upbeat and sunny about the recent unemployment figures. But, I just can’t shake the feeling that something ominous looms down the road–and not too far down the road.

Yeah, the unemployment number dropped to five percent of the workforce (this is cause for celebration–whatever happened to the goal of “full employment?”). But, as the smart dudes and dudettes at the Economic Policy Institute point out, there are things to worry about.

First, Jared Bernstein points out that while the job growth numbers for June–150,000–were strong, the total still fell short of what was forecasted by about 50,000 jobs. And as I’ve underscored before, thanks to EPI’s tracking report, the rate of job growth compared to past economic “recoveries” is still slower than it has been historically.

The other point that Bernstein makes, which tracks my concern about the housing bubble, is that a large contributor to the June employment figures were sectors connected to housing–construction, real estate and mortgage services. When that bubble bursts–as many observers believe it will–the employment numbers in housing will take a big wallop.

A companion EPI piece by Elise Gould is also a warning. As she observes, full-time employment is lagging compared to past recoveries. Well, duh–if Wal-Mart is the nation’s larger employer and much of the Wal-Mart jobs are part-time, that’s going to ripple through the economy.

So, here’s what’s going on: employers are adding fewer jobs partly because workers are busting their butts (productivity has been steady) and corporations don’t want to add more workers, and certainly not full-time workers with all those things called wages and benefits, if they can make profits using fewer people.