Another month, another mediocre jobs report from the Department of Labor. This is consistent with the rest of the economic evidence that this is a lackluster recovery that so far is not turning into a durable expansion.

The economy shed 131,000 jobs in July and the number of jobs created in May and June were revised downward to 221,000 lost jobs. The unemployment rate held steady at 9.5% but that does not reflect the fact that the number of discouraged workers is also up 389,000 from a year ago.

Private employment did inch up in July by 71,000 positions, with a nice 36,000 pick-up in manufacturing jobs, but even that number is deceptive. The vast majority of those jobs were in the auto industry. Alas, not every struggling manufacturing plant in America can have a lifeline to the federal Treasury.

The problem is if you're still looking for work, because the private sector isn't feeling confident enough to create new jobs. The declines in the household survey tend to reflect small businesses better than does the payroll survey, and small businesses in particular aren't creating new jobs the way they have in other recoveries. The shrinking size of the labor force is helping to keep the official jobless rate below 10%, but that's mostly because some one million workers have dropped out of the labor force since April.