http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_b...0601131017.asp
Not all jobs are created equal. Some are volatile and speculative, and some are backed by real, existing profits. As it turns out, the jobs created over the last several years are backed by record levels of corporate profit.
From 2001 to 2005, we’ve seen a 1.4 percent increase in payroll jobs. But over that same period of time, we’ve seen corporate profits jump from $767 billion to $1.3 trillion — an increase of more than 70 percent.
This is in stark contrast to the job boom of the late 1990s, which greatly outpaced the growth of corporate profits. From 1997 to 2000, corporate profits actually decreased from $868 billion to $817 billion, a drop of almost 6 percent. Over that same time period, payroll jobs increased from 122 million to 131 million — a jump of 7.4 percent. Profits were dropping, but corporations kept hiring new workers anyway.
It follows that since today’s jobs are backed by rapidly growing profits, they should be more stable than the ones created in the late 1990s.