The ho-hum economy continued its sleepwalk in September, creating 156,000 non-farm jobs overall but losing employment in manufacturing, the Labor Department reported Friday.

The total number of jobs was in the range that economists generally consider healthy —Un but below the 175,000 the experts had forecast. The unemployment rate actually ticked up to 5 percent, as more job-seekers entered the market.

“That means that millions of Americans are being left out of the recovery, hitting the young and minority workers particularly hard.”

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“I would characterize the jobs report as at best so-so,” said Alan Tonelson, an economic policy analyst who runs the blog RealityChek. “We saw pretty bad results when it comes to manufacturing on the jobs front. But we continue to see pretty good wage gain.”

Tonelson said 156,000 jobs this far into an economic recovery is a good number. But he said some 29,000 of those — nearly a fifth — came in what he calls the “subsidized private economy,” sectors like health care, social services, and for-profit education that are heavily reliant on government spending. Manufacturing, typically a higher-pay sector, shed 13,000 jobs in September.

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Tonelson said the wage gain in manufacturing is puzzling because of two long-term trends — anemic growth in the overall gross domestic product and slowing productivity gains. He said it is hard to see how wage increases can be sustained long-term if those two trends do not reverse.

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Some experts saw the glass as half-full. Loretta Mester, president of the Cleveland Federal Reserve, told CNBC”s “Squawk Box” Friday the prime rate — stuck near zero since the Great Recession — should rise.

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“It’s a solid labor market report,” she said. “This is very consistent with what we expected to see.”

Republican Donald Trump’s campaign blasted the economy’s performance in September as inadequate.

“Today’s weak September jobs report confirmed what people feel — that the Clinton-Obama economy is failing them,” senior economic adviser David Malpass said in a statement. “Americans desperately need more jobs and new economic policies, not the same-old, same-old offered by the Clinton campaign.”

Malpass argued that too many of the new jobs are in the low-paying service sector. He noted that the labor force participation rate stands near an all-time low, at 62.9 percent. Counting people who would like to work but have given up looking would make the unemployment rate 9.7 percent, he said.

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“That means that millions of Americans are being left out of the recovery, hitting the young and minority workers particularly hard,” he said in the statement.

The jobs picture was indeed much harsher for young adults, an important voting bloc for Democrat Hillary Clinton. Generation Opportunity, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for economic opportunities for the young, noted that effective unemployment rate is 12.7 percent of adults from age 18 to 29. For young black adults, that rate is 16.1 percent — for millennial Hispanics, it was 14.2 percent.

“Today’s lackluster job numbers signal that our sputtering economy has reached an unacceptable new normal,” Generation Opportunity spokeswoman Patrice Lee said in a prepared statement. “Millennials are the largest and most educated generation in the U.S., yet we are facing an unemployment rate of 12.7 percent. Our generation is struggling to find good-paying jobs or start our own businesses due to regulatory barriers that are creating roadblocks to quality opportunities.”