But it also went up. Oh no!

The "rate" for January was 9.7%, lower than the previous 10% figure that had spooked markets, investors and Democrats seeking re-election; a scary number that the Land of the Free hadn't experienced in almost two decades.

President Barack Obama said the lower rate was reason for "hope, not celebration".

The Republicans brayed like so many donkeys at the notion that there was any reason for hope at all. The markets tended to take the GOP (grand old party) view.

The US may well be slowly dragging itself out of recession but that recession won't mean a bag of beans to the average American, or the average anyone else, until such time as it translates into real job growth, or at least less job contraction.

More Americans are staying out of employment for longer than before, and when they lose their jobs, more and more are simply giving up. So, more and more people aren't showing up in the official rate of one in 10 or so.

But, just as the headline percentage figure came down, so more Americans joined the benefits queue than left it.

Yes, the president agreed, the number of jobs lost last month had gone up, but that number (20000) was nowhere near as bad as the figure for January 2009.

Things are getting better because they're getting less bad.

In South Africa, meanwhile, things are not getting better whichever way you look at them. We also have an official unemployment rate and that number's getting worse, just like the broader numbers.

The US president was speaking at the workshops of Oasis Mechanical Contractors, a business based in Maryland.

Obama was there to tell the public that the White House was slowly but surely winning the economic battle and that it was doing everything it could to help small businesses put a chicken back in every pot.

The president's men had fixed on Oasis Mechanical for a photo opportunity, probably because Oasis is a typical smaller business, founded by honest-to-goodness entrepreneurs, struggling to do a typically blue-collar job for its clients while paying a typically honest wage for an honest day's work. (It also isn't that far from the office - the oval one.)

The president used the photo op to announce that he had spotted something left over from the gargantuan big-business bailout pie he had got Congress to swallow with such reluctance.

After divvying up the pie, Obama told the nation's entrepreneurs, it turned out that there was a juicy slice left over - and he was going to dish it out to small business. The slice of pie amounted to no less than $30-billion and would be made available to smaller banks servicing smaller businesses, the real engine room of growth, Obama said.

The Republicans were having none of this and immediately carped that the $30-billion should rather have gone back from whence it came - the alarming budget deficit.

Again, they had a point. The money was voted for one thing and was now being used for another, quite different thing. Of course, the Democrats don't see it that way at all: all the dollars are going towards the same purpose - stability and growth.

Who's right and who's wrong in all of this won't become clear this week or next. It will be years before the wisdom of the Obama administration's response to the hospital pass it got from George Bush's team will be judged by the perfect hindsight of history.

The president and all on both sides of the US's seemingly widening bipartisan divide agree on one thing, though: small business will have to get back to work if the world's biggest economy is going to stagger to its feet and stay standing.

In the US, small-business debate is lively and near the top of the political agenda.

Here in South Africa, on the other hand, we're seriously debating the nationalisation of our mines and wondering what our libidinous president is going to get up to next in the sack, and with whom.

Our problems are bigger than theirs but our political focus is so much narrower.