In case you thought our plans for Syria were the only thing stuck in neutral:

The U.S. economy added 169,000 jobs last month and saw almost twice as many people, 312,000, leave the labor force. Meanwhile, estimates for June and July were revised downward by a combined 74,000, putting the three-month job-creation average at 148,000, which is barely enough to keep up with population growth. In fact, as Binyamin Appelbaum of the New York Times points out:

"The share of American adults with jobs fell slightly to 58.6 percent in August as population growth outpaced job growth.

"The United States is more than four years into a recovery so weak that this 'employment rate' has not recovered at all. As I noted last month, 63 out of 100 adults had jobs before the recession. Now 59 do." (link original)

The labor-force participation rate also remains stuck below 64 percent after remaining at or above 66 percent for the better part of two decades (1988 to 2008). At 63.2 percent, it hit a new 35-year low more than four years after the Great Recession ended; such a labor-force participation rate was last seen in August 1978, two months before I was born. Some of this reduction owes to baby boomers retiring, but not a majority of it. Had millions of American workers not gone missing, the unemployment rate very likely would still be above 9 percent.

On top of all that, part-time work still represents the lion's share of the jobs that are being created.

It may be only a matter of time before the Obama administration's parallels between World War II and Syria include an argument for going to war to boost the economy and create jobs ...