169,000 New Jobs!

Almost as if on cue, USA Today, in its classic "everything's OK, don't worry, be happy, nothing to see here" fashion, ran a big-ass front-page story this week trumpeting in its headline that the economy was "surging". Now, if you know anything at all about USA Today -- or, as some of us wags call it, USA Hooray -- when you see them using words like "surging" in a headline on an economic news story, you can be sure it's 99 & 44/100% pure bullshit.



But, anyway, assuming you believe USA Today, the economy's surging again! And, if you checked out the actual breakdown yourself at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you'd see that a pretty good chunk of them are rock-bottom-wage "service" jobs, not including the handful of "freelance" categories you see here -- including a newly-emerging job category showing a huge upswing at the end of the month, shortly after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and the Gulf Coasts of Mississippi and Alabama.

Medium-res jpg image, 1mb