Yes, goddammit, a job is a job. I've done a lot of them, and I didn't get the idea that I was too damn good for this job or that one. I worked my way up to better jobs, and in tough times dropped back down to worse ones. The idea that a "good job" is a right is a relatively recent phenomenon, burned into young adults in college, who believe that unless they have a company car and corner office in their first job then something's wrong with the world.

I'm fortunate that I'm currently working in a field I really like. It wasn't always the case, and it took a lot of work to get here.

Your bleeding heart is clogging the street gutters. You should write speeches for the Democrats. This kind of "list" would be perfect in the mouth of a Democratic candidate. A great emotional gush, no facts, no evidence, just the weaving of words designed to create an impression in the audience that somehow, somewhere, somebody is giving them the shaft, and that the person giving the speech will make it all better by taking the sword to the Evil Ones and passing the resulting loot out with great fanfare. Register to vote over here, folks.

You've got a Masters - well, that's great. I'll bet your mother is proud of you.

Gee, are fewer people with Masters degrees getting jobs now? Or more? Do you even know, or does the phrase just sound good? Or are we going for the standard Democratic White Crow technique: "Look, here's Joe with a Master's degree, and he doesn't have a job! Ha! Case closed!" You will see this a lot over the next few months, as the unemployment rate drops. There's always someone who doesn't have a job.

And a Masters in what? The Social Ramifications of Feminism In The Twentieth Century? Pal, if you have a degree like that you knew going in that you were going to be either flipping burgers, or teaching bullshit to other hapless university students for a living.

You want to raise a family - well, times have changed.

I'm raising a family. So are a lot of other people. Do you have evidence that fewer people are starting families? That those families are somehow deprived?

You'd like to own a home - well, you know, not everyone can.

Did you check the housing starts over the past six months? Are you aware that over two-thirds of Americans own their own homes? And that this percentage on average has risen steadily for years, and is still going up? In the fourth quarter of 2003, the rate was 68.5 percent, up from 64.1 percent in 1990.

You'd like your kids to go to college - well, they can, there a lot of help for familys in your income bracket.

Don't know much about this. I worked my way through college.

You'd like to see your family grow up - hey, with seniority you can work days.

You wish your wife could be home when the kids get home from school - well, the nice thing is that she can work nights, and BE there. And that way you'll only need the one car.

Do you even know what you mean here? Is the idea that people are working harder now than they used to? If it's two working parents that are the issue, you might want to check and see what has happened to the tax rates families have been paying since the 1950s, or the standards of living people are expecting now.

And when I was a kid, EVERYONE had only one car, unless you were rich, a farmer with a pickup truck on the side, or had a teenager rebuilding a junker.

I can't believe that I have to defend on this board a 5.4 percent unemployment rate and a growth rate of over 4 percent.

I can already see where the Democrats are going. As employment rises, they will say they aren't the "right kind" of jobs. How do they back this up? They never really need to, do they? The rhetoric makes their constituents happy enough.