From this morning’s New York Times:

“The United States economy added a meager 18,000 jobs in June, up from a gain of a revised 25,000 jobs in May, the Department of Labor said on Friday. The unemployment rate rose to 9.2 percent in June from 9.1 percent in May, the department said.

[…]

The report said that 14.1 million people were out of work in June, among them 6.3 million who have been jobless for six months or longer. In May, the total number of unemployed people was reported as 13.9 million, with the long-term unemployed at 6.2 million.

[…]

The Labor Department said that following gains that averaged 215,000 jobs per month from February through April, employment has been “essentially flat” for the past two months.”

By strange coincidence, right about the time that cutting spending, belt-tightening, and austerity became the order of the day. Couldn’t be any correlation between the two, could there? But never mind, it’ll have no influence whatsoever on the 2012 election. Fluffy said so.