8.4 million jobs have been vaporized since the recession began

The Labor Department revised its previous estimates for the number of jobs that have been lost over the past 25 months. What they found wasn't pretty.
 

Since the recession began in December 2007, the economy has lost 1.4 million more jobs than previously believed. The adjustments also showed losses for 2009 alone came to 4.8 million jobs, greater than 600,000 more than previously estimated.

"We're coming out of a very, very steep downturn," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "The revisions show that we have a really big hole to come out of."

In terms of job losses, this has been the worst recession since the end of the World War II more than 60 years ago.