This Decade's Extraordinarily Good Job Creation Performance

December's job report completes the fifth year of this decade. So far, this has been an extraordinarily good decade.

First, a simple fact. The economy has now created more jobs in the first half of this decade than it did in all of the 1950s.

First, measured by jobs created, 2014 is the best year yet for the decade. This recovery is not slowing. Not yet.

The unemployment rate, too, dropped last year at an impressive rate, the second year in a row in which it dropped by more than 1 point. At 5.6%, it is back to what it was in the summer before Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy in 2008. Remember that in December of 2009, it was 9.9%. 

So how does this compare to past decades? It stands out.

Not only has the American economy created more jobs in the first half of this decade than it did in all of the 1950s, it has easily outperformed the first five years of every decade since. 10.7 million jobs is nearly double what the economy created in the first half of the 1980s.

I wonder if the pundits will change their tune about this terrible economy before the decade is over or if they're just going to leave that to historians.