michelle girard joins us now. thank you for coming on the show. i always love to have you on jobs day. >> like you said, january was a little bit like. when you look at the revisions, the payroll numbers were better in 2012 then they thought and they were particularly stronger in the fourth quarter where payroll growth averaged over 200,000 in the month. it is not a great story, but a story, i think, that shows the labor market is continuing to prove. a story on that is frustrating. melissa: right now it seems i can enter routable number. >> that is exactly right. i am clearly optimistic. i did not see it happening until 2016. this is the issue. we still have a labor market that is slowly, slowly recovering. all of the losses that we are still climbing back from. you said you do not think we will hit 6% for four years. they will leave the interest rate low targeting unemployment. a lot of people have asked me today why the market is so happy if the numbers are so bad. >> there were signs that the economy is holding. particularly, when you look at

michelle girard, senior economist at rc greenwich capital is here now, a favorite economist of ours. nomy is just way subpar, bumping along a bottom, absolutely not good enough. what's your take? >> yes, well, that's absolutely true, stuart. you know, it looked very weak in the fourth quarter, but the underlying data actually were better. we had better consumer spending and business spending and that decline of 1/10 of a percent indicated, but let's face it, we're excited that consumer spending is growing 2.2%. and it's going to be weaker in the first quarter. i mean, these are levels that are very subpar, well below the historical norms if you would suggest and you're right, even though we economists keep telling everybody, we're growing, we're growing, things are getting better and if someone doesn't feel a whole lot better as people want to suggest. >> i'm sure you listened to last night's state of the union speech. to my mind the president was calling for more revenue, tax increase coming from the private sector, coupled with much more government spending. did you think that that