One-third of the american jobs created between 2001 and 2004 went to 16 million people. That's a tiny number in a country of nearly 300 million. It's equal to the populations of Florida or greater Los Angeles. So who are these lucky ones, this 5% of the total population behind 33% of the new jobs? Redheads, perhaps? Hockey fans? (No, that's way too many hockey fans.) Asian immigrants? (Good guess, but wrong.) Correct answer: the residents of 397 rural U.S. counties averaging 40,000 in population. And ignored by the big city press! Think about this. If an outsize percentage of new U.S. jobs hatched during the last three years had occurred anywhere near the media hives of New York, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles, you would have heard about it You would have seen daily stories on TV and in major newspapers about America being a roaring jobs-creation machine. John Kerry might have had to drop his "Benedict Arnold CEO" schtick in the face of such good news. Paul Krugman would have had to expel his columnist's gas on other topics. Gas prices, perhaps.
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