Headline Writers

I was the editor for both my high school newspaper and my college newspaper, so I know a little bit about headline writing.

This is a great example. This is the headline from the AP today:  Unemployment Falls in 37 States.

Sounds like bullish news. But that is dispelled in the first paragraph:

A majority of states saw their unemployment rates drop in May. But the widespread declines were mainly because people gave up work searches and were no longer counted.

As I have noted in previous posts, if everyone would just quit looking for work, the unemployment numbers would plummet, to around 0%. 

The rest of the article:

The Labor Department says the unemployment rate fell in 37 states. Six states had increases and seven saw no change.

Forty-one states saw a net increase in jobs. But that reflected national data showing a huge gain because of government hiring of temporary census workers.

Nevada rose to the highest jobless rate in the country, marking the first time in more than four years that Michigan did not hold the top spot. Nevada's rate was 14 percent. Michigan fell to 13.6 percent.

The unemployment news above is just the tip of the iceberg. It is going to get very, very ugly by the end of the summer going into the autumn, off-cycle elections. By then, the effect of states cutting their payrolls to balance their budgets will start being felt, another AP story.

The layoff ax has hit public sector payrolls with force as states wrestle with massive budget shortfalls. Since August 2008, some 231,000 state and local government jobs have disappeared -- 22,000 last month alone, according to federal data.

The majority of the cuts are on the local level, which at 14.4 million workers is nearly three times the size of the state workforce. Plus, unlike at the federal level, most of these cuts come from the ranks of teachers, cops, firefighters and social service workers.

And more pain is coming down the pike. Some 19 states say they plan to implement layoffs to narrow budget gaps, according to a recent survey.

The cuts will be even deeper if Congress doesn't give $24 billion to the states to help cover Medicaid costs. This legislation, along with a $23 billion bill to fund teachers' salaries, is bogged down in political posturing on Capitol Hill.

It's hardly political posturing when the country is $19 trillion in debt, 90% of GDP, and growing daily.