Friday's employment numbers showed a reasonable gain of 165,000 jobs added to the payroll in April. These are preliminary numbers, as today’s report also shows that the numbers for February and March have now been adjusted upward. So, there is some hope that things may be better than they appear. A separate survey also was released today, based on a survey of households, from which we learned that the overall unemployment rate edged slightly down to 7.5%.

This is the second of a four-part series describing what went wrong with America’s economy and how to fix it. See Part 3 tomorrow and read Part 1:  " Tell Us What You Think: What’s Wrong With the U.S. Economy? The Real Scoop " —and please leave a comment to tell us what you think. (Click the chart to enlarge.)

If the short answer is “we’re still recovering from the Crash of 2008,” the long answer is “there was obviously something wrong with the economy long before the Crash of 2008.” 

There were obvious warning signs during the Bush years that should have set off alarm bells.  Most importantly, wages and middle-class family incomes were dead in the water.  The median income for working-age families  started falling in 2000 and never recovered during the 2001-2007 recovery .

Passing along a great tool—the Monthly Latino Employment Report from the National Council of La Raza ( NCLR ) offers a snapshot of the latest Latino employment statistics.