TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

The Labor Department announced today that the economy added 200,000 jobs in December and that the unemployment rate dropped to 8.5 percent. Most encouraging, though, is the decrease in the unemployment rate was not primarily due to people dropping out of the job market, as has been true in previous months:

Among the pieces of good news in Friday’s report: the drop in the jobless rate came largely from real gains, not from discouraged workers giving up the job hunt. The new jobs were spread broadly across industries, with transportation and warehousing, retail, manufacturing and restaurants all hiring.

200,000 jobs is significant, too, because it’s more than the 125,000 jobs or so a month required to keep up with population growth. We need much more growth than that to dig ourselves out of the hole the 2007-2009 recession dug, but at this point, any growth is positive.