ALI VELSHI: I want to put a big asterisk here, because every first Friday of the month I do this report on the jobs numbers, and I get all sorts of tweets about how this was Barack Obama who did this or it's Donald Trump who did this or you don't give Obama credit or you don't give Trump credit. I always say this: Presidents get altogether too much credit and blame for jobs numbers. With that information let me give you this, 211,000 jobs were added to the U.S. payrolls in April. That's actually a pretty good number. 250,000 is kind of the sweet spot, if we got that every month we'd be doing very well. So, [211,000] is a pretty good number.
The unemployment rate. Now, I always say this and I've been saying this for a quarter-century, pay less attention to this because this is a percentage of a moving number. But yes, it is the lowest point that it's been at since 2007. Now, 2017 so far, we've averaged 185,000 net new jobs a month. And when I say “net new jobs” it means there are always jobs created and jobs lost, this is the outcome: 185,000 a month. So that's about exactly where we were for 2016, so no major improvement over [2016]. This is okay, it's not terrible. It's pretty good.
