That's the way to do it:
U.S. employers added 157,000 workers overall to their payrolls in December, bringing the year-end total of new jobs to 2.2 million, the best showing in five years. The unemployment rate held steady at 5.4 percent.The Labor Department reported Friday that the 2.2 million new jobs created in 2004 were the most in any year since 1999, when employers added 3.2 million positions, based on a government survey of businesses.
2.2 million non-farm payroll jobs make for an employment boom thirty percent higher than the White House's forecast in June 2003, then derided by critics as overly optimistic. Journalists unsettled by the report are left to point at the 11% discrepancy between payrolls and economists' consensus forecast, despite the fact that numbers for October and November were revised upward by a total twice that amount. Or, as in the case of the AP story quoted above, ink was spent on a minor misstatement from the president.
It's good news.