The Labor Department numbers for January came out today, and the most widely followed (and most misleading) employment statistic, the unemployment rate, fell. The bad news was that the economy is still shedding jobs, 20,000 last month. We cannot have any meaningful growth, and we will not have a revived real estate market without job growth. And this we do not yet have. In the State of the Union, the President recognized this and proposed several new programs to create jobs. Most of these have been seconded by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which will support the administration’s initiative. The funding of these proposals will come from repaid TARP funds and unallocated stimulus monies.  Now, we can point to the better numbers that are coming out of the housing sector in the form of pending and actual sales, and argue that housing will lead us out of this recession as it has done so often in the past. But the jobs numbers undercut that argument. Right now, the housing market in most areas of the country is a Federal creation, the product of the expanded home buyer tax credit. Take that away and there is not enough economic strength to sustain a housing recovery. I think the economy and the housing market will continue to grow slowly in 2010, but beware of the early year figures with a deceptively low unemployment number and a tax credit driven home sales number. It ain’t that good yet.