Missouri a Red State in Ways We Hadn't Thought Of

In between watching our admittedly already crappy retirement account go further down the crapper along with the Dow yesterday, Unreal happened upon this nifty USA Today feature that plots a 2009-'10 jobs forecast on graphs and maps.

Always a sucker for graphs and maps, we clicked around awhile....

USA Today/Moody's Economy.com

See that? That's a map of the good ol' US of A, color coded to show how many jobs Moody's Economy.com says are gonna be lost because of this current recession thingie.

Green means positive job growth. Red means lost jobs. So according to the map, Missouri's in a pickle. (For purposes of this exercise, think of pickles as being red instead of green.) We're forecast to shed 2.9 percent of the jobs in this state over the course of 2009.

Not as bad as, say, Michigan (-4.3 percent), but on a scale of 1 to Crappy, we're well on our way to Crapville. In fact, we're tied (with Ohio) for fifth-steepest decline. The Top 5:

1 Michigan -4.3%
2 Connecticut -3.4%
2 (tie) Hawaii -3.4%
4 Florida -3%
5 Missouri -2.9%
5 (tie) Ohio -2.9%

And don't let that sunny "Jobs may rebound in 2010" line fool you -- there's plenty more bad news if you continue to break it down in '09.

Or, to put it more accurately, USA Today allows us to behold the bad news in all manner of colorful ways:





And here (above) we have construction jobs on the left and education and health jobs on the right. More red -- even when places like Oklahoma and Arkansas and Indiana are rolling in green!

Here're some more:















Bottom line: If you're looking for a career change but can't relocate, now'd be a good time to consider a government job -- or mining.