What's next? "Halliburton?"

I can always tell when I've clocked you a good one when you degenerate into random cracker-barrel stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with the post in question.

Or are we stipulating that the Congressional Budget Office is a source of conservative propaganda? If so, I'm writing that one down for future use.

In 2001, at the peak of the 90's employment boom, there were 132,530,000 payroll jobs. This dropped to 129,822,000 jobs in 2003. From there, it climbed steadily to 138,152,000 jobs at the end of 2007. That's 5.62 million more jobs than at the peak of the 90s boom.

Right now, there are still two million more jobs than there were at the 90s peak. This isn't as good as it looks because there are almost ten million shiny new workers in America since that time, hence the higher unemployment rate.

The number of workers in the U.S. has gone up in a steady straight line from about 82 million in 1970 to almost 154 million now. Almost double.

If we had the same number of available workers now that we had at the 90s peak in 2001, the unemployment rate right this minute would be about 1.4 percent.