So Much For That 52 Straight Months Of Job Growth

This is the surest sign of recession.

The U.S. unexpectedly lost jobs for the first time in more than four years, increasing the odds the economy will fall into a recession and making it likely the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates another half point next month.

Payrolls fell by 17,000 in January after an 82,000 gain in December that was larger than initially reported, the Labor Department said today in Washington. None of the 80 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News predicted a decline.

They can make the interest rate negative-8, it's not going to help a whole lot.

Additionally, the revised figures show 376,000 less jobs for the year 2007, which means in 2007 the United States did not keep up with the rate of population growth.

You would think this would be the time to get that green jobs program going and start using the American innovation advantage to offset this downturn, but actually you'd be wrong.

President Bush has long touted clean coal technology as a potential solution to global warming. In 2006, he insisted that the United States is “spending quite a bit of money here at the federal level to come up with clean-coal technologies.” During Monday’s State of the Union address, Bush said, “Let us fund new technologies that can generate coal power while capturing carbon emissions.”

Yet just 24 hours after his SOTU declaration, Bush’s Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman indicated the White House was pulling the plug on the ambitious FutureGen project, a clean coal plant that was touted as “the cleanest fossil fuel fired power plant in the world.”

Is this Presidency over yet?