The inestimable Mark Steyn writing at NRO:

"I'm not concerned about a double-dip recession," Obama said last week. Nor would I be if I had government housing, a car and driver, and a social secretary for the missus. But I wonder if it's such a smart idea to let one's breezy insouciance out of the bag when you're giving a press conference. In May the U.S. economy added just 54,000 jobs. For the purposes of comparison, that same month over 100,000 new immigrants arrived in America.

So what kind of jobs were those 54,000? Economics professorships at the University of Berkeley? Non-executive directorships at Goldman Sachs? That sort of thing? No, according to an analysis by Morgan Stanley, half the new jobs created were at McDonald's. That's amazing. Not the Mickey D supersized hiring spree, but the fact that there's fellows at Morgan Stanley making a bazillion dollars a year analyzing fluctuations in minimal-skill fast-food service-job hiring trends. What a great country! For as long as it lasts. Which is probably until some new regulatory agency starts enforcing Michelle Obama's dietary admonitions.

[...]

A couple of days later, Chet's announced it was closing after nine decades. "It was the economy and the smoking ban that hurt us more than anything," said the owner. But maybe he can retrain and re-open it as a community-organizer grantwriting-application center. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the median period of unemployment is now nine months - the longest it's been since they've been tracking the numbers. Long-term unemployment is worse than in the Depression. Life goes slowly waiting for a fast-food job to open up.

Indeed. Read the whole thing.