Posted on 07/26/2012 6:48:35 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Right now you are probably asking yourself: “What would it be like to live in a place with an unemployment rate of 1 percent?”
Me, too! So I went to Williston, N.D., to find out. There are certain things that journalists do as a public service because you, the noble reader, are probably not going to do them for yourself — like attending charter revision meetings or reading the autobiography of Tim Pawlenty. Going to Williston is sort of in this category. The people are lovely, but you’re talking about a two-hour drive from Minot.
If you did come, however, you would feel really, really wanted. Radio ads urged me to embark on a new career as a bank teller, laborer, railroad conductor or cake decorator. The local Walmart has a big sign up, begging passers-by to consider starting their lives anew in retail sales. The Bakken Region Recruiter lists openings in truck driving, winch operating and canal maintenance work, along with ads for a floral designer, bartender, public defender, loan officer, addiction counselor and sports reporter. All in an area where the big city has a population of around 16,000.
There’s an oil boom. The Bakken formation, which runs under the western part of North Dakota and into Montana, contains a huge amount of oil, which the industry figured out how to extract about five years ago. Williston’s median income, which was under $30,000 when the serious drilling started, has jumped to well over $50,000 a year. Job-seekers flooded in. The schools are now so crowded that teachers are holding classes in modular units, some dating back to the ’80s, and one that was constructed by a high school shop class.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Things are different out West compared to NYC. A two hour drive at 80 mph is nothing.
My daughter took the “Go North” advice, except she went farther north to Canada. She got her master’s degree at UBC and just landed an excellent full-time job in Whistler, BC. The Canadian economy is booming due to a pro-business government and business-friendly tax and regulatory policies (great article on this in Forbes Magazine this week).
The comments were astonishingly negative.
Well it is the NYT.
Canada has a conservative, pro-business Prime Minister, unlike The US where we have a socialist, self-centered, would-be foreign dictator!
RE: The Canadian economy is booming due to a pro-business government and business-friendly tax and regulatory policies
Canada has under Stephen Harper:
1) Reduced Corporate taxes to 15% (How’s the USA going to compete with a corporate tax at 35%, THE WOLD’s HIGHEST?)
2) Canada exploits her ENERGY RESOURCES — Shale, oil, natural gas, etc. and would have exported more of them to the USA via the Keystone Pipeline.
Obama and the Senate Dems stopped it and the result is Canada just sells what she has to the Chinese.
3) Canada’s banks don’t do subprime mortgages the way we do here.
WHY AM I NOT SURPRISED that CANADIANS ARE NOW RICHER ON AVAERAGE THAN AMERICANS?
I went and looked -- you are right. But it seems like they are all written by metrosexual pantywaists who wouldn't last a week in the rough and tumble boom camps. I worked in Rock Springs, Wyoming in the boom years of the early 70s and had friends who worked over in Gillette, WY. It is not for the faint of heart, but there is good honest hard work available and it pays very well. Real Americans will pack up and move to where the work is, hardships be damned. The panties-in-a-wad crowd will stay in Manhattan and bemoan the fact we don't have Lenin or Stalin at the helm.
The typical smart-ass snot-nosed crap we’ve come to expect from the NYT progressive ilk. It will be a pleasure to watch their retching on the Wednesday after the election when they realize their 60’s world has left them FOREVER. As PJ O’Rourke once wrote: it’s the scrap heap of history for them and they know it . . .
Just read the comments. Maybe when the newly minted N. Dakota multi-millionaires start throwing their weight around they’ll get it. Break up the banks and kill the northeast real estate market some more and watch them squirm.
It will be a lot of fun to be a conservative the next four years!
surprised? they are written by the swells that read that rag...
All sound like a bunch of candy asses that never got their hands dirty.
The horror of people actually living in a house trailer so they can actually work at a well paying job, was just too much for them.
:: I went to Williston, N.D ::
In June, yet. /snicker.
The article was interesting and surprisingly honest regarding the pro’s and con’s of the Bakken oil fields.
Yet, in the end she writes a snaking statement regarding the inconveniences which infers that being unemployed in NYC is better than working in NW North Dakota.
How unfortunate that the elitists in the NE USA are unwilling to work hard like our pioneer ancestors were. Perhaps the ND oil should be declared off limits for this NE crowd who want to live off the hard work of others rather than move to where the jobs are. Let’s let them pay $5.00 - $8.00 for a gallon of gas like their champion, Obama, promised us in 2008.
We don't?
Undoubtedly, they have higher standards than NYC men have.
The “man camps” sound like the CHUs we lived in in Iraq and Afghanistan. As long as you’re not there permanently (let’s say no more than 18 months), it actually can be pretty comfortable living. It depends on the monthly pay, of course.
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