While children across North Carolina eagerly await Halloween and the opportunity to go trick-or-treating, some of their parents would like an opportunity to join them. Only in the case of the parents, they would be looking for jobs, not candy.

While the search for candy on Halloween will be an easy one for the children, keeping jobs and finding jobs are becoming harder and harder for adults to do.

For the fourth month in a row, North Carolina’s unemployment rate has grown, moving upward from 9.7 percent in May to 10.5 percent in September. That 10.5 percent unemployment rate for September is 1.4 percent higher than the jobless rate for the nation in September.

President Barack Obama’s jobs plan would help provide some of those needed jobs, but that plan is not enough. We agree with huffingtonpost.com that the 1.9 million new jobs Obama’s jobs bill would produce in 2010 comes up short when it comes to what is needed to put the economy back on track to return to prerecession unemployment levels of 6 percent nationally.

It’s that weak economy that’s left about 14 million people unemployed.

From what we’ve gleaned, the Republican jobs plan calls for creating jobs another way. The Senate Republican Jobs Plan, available on several GOP senators’ official websites, calls for “growing jobs by creating an environment for private-sector growth through fiscal discipline and pro-growth economic policies that will turn things around and add jobs.”

Obama and the Democrats are pushing the president’s jobs bill. Republicans are pushing just as hard against it. While these employed Democrats and Republicans are working (or is that playing) at politics in Washington, D.C., unemployment in the Original Washington remains in double digits.

North Carolina’s jobless residents don’t need promises. They don’t need politics. They don’t need partisan gamesmanship.

They need jobs. They need their elected leaders at the local, state and federal level to stop talking about jobs and do something that will create jobs.

And if those leaders fail to do so, voters have the option to put them in the unemployment line.