Bucking the trend

Maybe Mitch was on to something with that whole "rebuilding is over" speech.

All but one of the biggest U.S. metropolitan areas added jobs over the past year, and only two had higher jobless rates in April than they did a year ago.

Payrolls grew in 50 U.S. metro areas with a population of 1 million or more in April compared with a year earlier, the Labor Department said Wednesday.

The biggest increase occurred in Silicon Valley’s San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro area, where payrolls grew 6%. That was followed by the areas surrounding Orlando, Fla., where payrolls grew 4.3%, and Riverside, Calif., which saw 4.1% payroll growth. Employment in New Orleans-Metrairie—the only metro area without an increase—held steady in April from a year ago.

A couple of things worth repeating. The city was always going to be rebuilt.  That's what FEMA is for (despite whatever blustery proclamations may have come out of Dennis Hastert at the time.) The federally funded rebuilding of the city was always going to spur a bit of an economic boom. Because that's how economic stimulus works.  Maybe we really are reaching the end of that cycle.

The specific challenge to our local leaders during the rebuilding process was to see to it that the benefits of that work would not be swept up by elite opportunists but instead accrue equitably to those who were hurt by the event.  From where we sit today, it looks like they've done a pretty crappy job at meeting that challenge.