I'm a little worried about the recent labor report showing a loss of 4,000 jobs last month. Actually it was a net loss of 4,000 jobs after hundreds of thousands of people found jobs and hundreds of thousands of people lost jobs resulting in an overall loss of 4,000 jobs.

This is one way the economic data can be a little deceiving. Some people might ask what the big deal is if 4,000 people lost their jobs in a country of 300 million people, but the truth is that hundreds of thousand of people lost their jobs.

There were a few articles written in the past couple of days saying that the poor jobs report and the losses in the stock market are a result of the housing crash extending to other areas of the economy. I'm not sure if this is the only reason for poor performance in the economy, but it is hard to argue that there has been no influence.

Countrywide Mortgage company said yesterday that they might need to layoff 12,000 employees. This will have ripple effects throughout the economy. The number of people not being able to make their mortgage payments will also influence the economy in a negative way.

It sounds like the government is working on plans to bail out people and companies who made poor housing investments, but I'm not sure this is how the market is supposed to work. I would rather see the government put controls on predatory lending practices before they go sour and begin begging for a bailout.

Hopefully this mess will get figured out so the people who made bad housing investments will stop hurting the rest of our investment portfolios and the overall economy.

Although even if we get the housing mess figured out, we still see household budgets being depleted by high gas prices. I also don't like the amount of debt our government is taking on to pay interest on our current debt and to pay $16 billion a month for a war that isn't going well.