When it comes to economic recovery, Minnesota is about as good as it gets….
According to government data, which show that state unemployment peaked at 8.5 percent in the downturn, employers slashed roughly 154,000 jobs but have added back fewer than 27,000 ”” or only about 18 percent of those lost.
Big local employers including Medtronic, a medical device maker, and Hutchinson Technology, which makes components for disk drives, have announced layoffs in recent weeks. Small to medium-size companies say they are nervous about government policy and are reluctant to hire.
A depressed real estate market remains a drag on the local economy ”” as it does in many other places.
And how has the Democratic Candidate for President, BHO, been focusing on jobs like a laser? Zero, Zilch, Nada.
The only thing more pathetic than BHO is the Lame Stream Media trying to create the perception of recovery out of disastor. Ben Bernanke doesn’t care what happens; he’ll just write a book praising his own genius.
If you zoom in, there are little fragments of recovery here and there: where do they come from? From companies, large, medium, and small, who find a way to create value in spite of ALL the roadblocks the Federal government puts in their ways. Isn’t that great, we have to use our smarts to defeat the stupidity of government in order to grow. God bless all the stubborn entreprenues who won’t give up.
Better story next door. ND unemployment at 4.5%, state budget in surplus. And ND is only state (?) to have its own state bank. Much of this is driven by oil exploration.
It’s not just the Federal government that Minnesota businesses are worried about. Despite turning over both houses of the Minnesota legislature to the Republicans in 2010, we got stuck with [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Dayton]Mark Dayton[/url] as governor, [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_gubernatorial_election,_2010]thanks to a third-party candidate who got almost 12% of the vote[/url]. Dayton is, of course, very experienced with business, having inherited a great deal of wealth from people who created a successful one.