NYT: Just Another $6.00 Blog -- Everything To Do About The Bakken

Before going to the link below, re-acquaint yourself with the last graph of "17 Graphs for the 17th."

OK, so you saw the graph.

Now, read the NYT's Nobel laureate on the subject:

Meanwhile, what about jobs? I have to admit that I started laughing when I saw The Wall Street Journal offering North Dakota as a role model. Yes, the oil boom there has pushed unemployment down to 3.2 percent, but that's only possible because the whole state has fewer residents than metropolitan Albany, N.Y. -- so few residents that adding a few thousand jobs in the state's extractive sector is a really big deal. The comparable-sized fracking boom in Pennsylvania has had hardly any effect on the state's overall employment picture, because, in the end, not that many jobs are involved.

And this tells us that giving the oil companies carte blanche isn't a serious jobs program. Put it this way: Employment in oil and gas extraction has risen more than 50 percent since the middle of the last decade, but that amounts to only 70,000 jobs, around one-twentieth of 1 percent of total U.S. employment. So the idea that drill, baby, drill can cure our jobs deficit is basically a joke.

He fails to mention, that no sustainable jobs were created by a trillion dollars in stimulus.

But back to the Bakken:

• US steel industry: pipeline, drilling, rigs, 
• railroad: BNSF (Warren Buffett),
• housing: developers from Idaho, Colorado, 
• trucking industry: truck manufacturer in Portland -- additional hiring; extra shift
• hedge funds, stock brokers: need we say more? 

The Nobel laureate apparently does not realize that the unemployment rate has always been low; not due to oil industry; oil industry is bringing in tens of thousands of workers from other states with high unemployment rates; the joke is that there is no one left in Idaho -- they've all moved to North Dakota.

It would be interesting if the laurel-wearer can come up with one industry outside the oil and gas industry that has done so well providing new jobs in the US.

It certainly isn't the newspaper industry. It would be interesting to see his take on the current status of the US mainstream media.

So much for fact-based journalism in the NYT. Just another blog. Except it will cost you $6.00 for the Sunday edition.

A huge "thank you" to "Popeye" for alerting me to the NYT op-ed piece. As the piece said, "I started laughing when I saw ..."