The right hand side was hypotheticals. The column I used for the numbers I gave was 2003 ROCE, which I assume was accurate. I also assume there is only one definition for ROCE, unless you think you can parse this even further.

It was obviously not a complete cross-section of the industries, but I think I made my point that 31 percent is not an outrageous number in this category, any more than 9 percent is an outrageous profit number by normal calculations.

It was more work than I wanted to go to, but if I'd just let your ROCE post hang out there, everyone would have gone to bed tonight assuming that 31 percent was a number so completely insane that we should immediately nationalize the oil industries.

It never hurts to get the whole picture.

If you want to get into "number of people employed," maybe we should be talking BLS household employment statistics (which includes self-employed and other categories) which show about 6.5 million more people employed now than at the previous peak in March 2001. But we can stick to non-farm payroll if you insist, which shows only 2.7 million more employed now than the previous record in February of 2001.

But the real point is, up until the unemployment rate stopped telling Democrats what they wanted to hear, it was a perfectly acceptable statistic.