Good Ol' Rick Perry!

[thewayne]

"Sure, Perry has created thousands of jobs. I'm working three of them."
— joke currently circulating in Texas

LOL! I saw a study that showed the job in growth in Texas is pretty much entirely due to population growth, it's been mostly in the area of required government services: teachers, police, fire, etc.

The sad thing is that it's also true up here. I stopped at a gas station at 4am this morning to get some caffeine on my way to the observatory, was complaining to an acquaintance working there that I don't function well on three hours of sleep. She tells me that she's working three jobs.

We have a very basic problem. The easiest way to add jobs is to expand manufacturing capacity, and we've off-shored most of ours. With the recession 2-3 years ago, a lot of companies found that they can still be profitable with a smaller staff, so they're not seeing a huge need to add more people on when there's no guarantee sales/profits are going to go up. I just read that Bank of America is laying off, as have many other major banks. The country was led down a heck of a rabbit hole, and it's going to be a very long and tough crawl to get out of it, if ever we really do..

Comments

[silveradept]

The seeds of this item have been shouted from the Rust Belt for the last couple decades. Supposedly, all of the old-world manufacturers would be able to find work in the new tech-and-knowldege market. And until the banks had their bluffs called, they could fake it pretty well.