Friday, December 04, 2009

Unemployment Geography

One of my coworkers sent me this very interesting link yesterday - The Decline: The Geography of a Recession. It's an animated map that uses Bureau of Labor Statistics figures to trace the growth of nationwide unemployment by county from January 2007 (about a year before the start of the recession) to October of 2008 (the last month for which official figures are available). The color-coding allows you to track the level of unemployment by time and location.

About the only thing I can say after watching the dark colors of unemployment march across the map is this: if you're one of our elected reprehensives with your head up your doctrinal backside, pull it out and start doing your job. This is not a time for saying "no" to everything the other side tries to do. It's not a time to score cheap political points at the expense of tens of millions of out-of-work Americans. It's a time to work together to put America back to work.

Get up off your useless backsides and do the jobs you were elected to do.

I'm too mad to write anything else. Good thing tomorrow is Cartoon Saturday...God knows I need it.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

P.S. - If you want to see something else scary, check out Mike's post featuring Bill O'Reilly. You'll really need Cartoon Saturday, then.

B.

5 comments:

KKTSews said...

Yep, that is one of the most depressing things I've seen on the web.

Bandit said...

Scary! Here in St. Louis we used to be second to Detroit in car manufacturing. I have driven past the Chrysler plant a few times this summer. It used to employ thousands making trucks and mini vans. It is a sad looking ghost town now.

Mike said...

Did you notice the red area in the middle of Missouri? That's the county with the state capital in it. Seems like the recession hasn't hit there yet.

Leslie David said...

Very scary being a contractor and all. Of course that's assuming politicians really care about representing their constituents and doing what they want, instead of insane power grabs.

Mrs. Geezerette said...

Dark and depressing for sure. Things don't look all that promising either even with today's good news.