January job growth was raised from 97,000 to 159,000 new jobs.

So, I guess the 21,000-job sound byte is now history. The 3 million lost jobs Kerry keeps spouting about was never precisely true.

The largest loss (from a peak of 132,507,000 payroll jobs in March of 2001 to a low of 129,789,000 jobs in August of 2003) is 2,718,000 jobs. You could round that up to 3 million, but it's really stretching a fact.

Right now we are down 1,959,000 jobs from the peak. So if we accept Kerry's rounding, the tax cuts have gotten us a million new jobs.

Precise unemployment figures are 5.695 percent for March, 5.578 percent for February, and 5.649 percent for January.