I wouldn’t call the new jobs numbers good economic news, per se. They’re more like not-as-bad economic news. Recently, we’ve average 650,000 jobs losses a month. April saw a “mere” 539,000 lost jobs. And a lot of the jobs created were on the federal-side of the ledge. The private sector lost 611,000 jobs in April. So we lost a lot of jobs. But not as many jobs as we’ve been losing. Which is to say that the news is bad but the trend is good.

Ezra Klein is a former Prospect writer and current editor-in-chief at Vox. His work has appeared in the LA Times, The Guardian, The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, Slate, and The Columbia Journalism Review. He’s been a commentator on MSNBC, CNN, NPR, and more.