10.19.2005

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.

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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.

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