June job growth was a healthy 222,000 . . . but we can do better

We talk about this every time there's a job report, and we'll probably always talk about it because most people don't really have a proper frame of reference for how many new jobs qualifies as a lot. Anything with six figures sounds like a lot, and the Obama Administration would often claim "robust" job growth of 100,000 or so in a given month. That's not actually robust at all, but most people don't know that it takes nearly 200,000 new jobs in a month just to keep pace with growth in the population and the workforce. So how good is the news that we produced 220,000 new jobs in June? It's good news. It's not earth-shatteringly great news. But it's good, and we shouldn't sneeze at good: