Many economic signs indicate that the recession is starting to improve. We ostensibly got another one today: The government released numbers saying that about 400,000 new jobs had been created in the last month. The bad news: most of those are temporary jobs with the Census. The really bad news: look (in this chart from Calculated Risk) how far behind we are other recessions in regaining our jobs. By far behind, I mean: Setting a new paradigm for lack of job recovery. The dotted line is employment without the Census jobs, which appear to actually be flatlining. This will, apparently, take a while.