Before I go into today’s jobs numbers, can I just offer a word of advice to the economists out there?

Don’t play the lottery. Just don’t. You’re just not good at picking numbers lately.

Case in point? June’s Employment Situation Report, released this morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which shows that the economy added only 18,000 jobs last month.

Now, it doesn’t take someone who tested out of college math (thankyouverymuch) to understand that 18,000 is quite a departure from the nearly 200,000 added jobs economists predicted would be added.

(I won’t even bring up how something very similar happened with last month’s projections.)

Here’s a summary of the June Employment Situation Report:

• The U.S. economy added just 18,000 jobs in June, the fewest in eight months and far fewer than the 200,000 analysts originally anticipated.
• Private employers added 57,000 jobs, while government agencies cut 39,000 jobs.
• The unemployment rate increased from 9.1 percent to 9.2 percent, the highest it’s been since December.
• The number of unemployed Americans in rose to 14.1 million in June from 13.9 million in May.

Also like last month, the government revised the previous month’s numbers to reflect that job growth was even slower than originally thought, with only 25,000 jobs added in May (down from the 54,000 jobs reported at the time).

And just to intensify that migraine point out exactly how bad these numbers actually are for hopes of ‘recovery’ (should we still be using that word?), remember that the economy needs to add 125,000 jobs a month just to keep up with the population growth.

So, yeah…Hard to believe it’s been two years since the recession ‘officially’ ended, huh? Doesn’t it seem like never ago?