Go West, Young Man (To North Dakota)

Economic Collapse Blog

Are you unemployed and out of options? Well, if you live in most areas of the country there is not much hope for you. But there is one state where hiring is really hot right now. If you are desperate for a job, you just might want to check out North Dakota. Way back in the middle of the 19th centurty, author Horace Greeley gave young Americans the following advice: "Go West, young man, go West". Well, we have reached another moment in U.S. history when it may be wise for many Americans to pick up and move to another part of the country in search of opportunity. Of course traveling to North Dakota is not "going west" for all Americans, but for the majority of the population it is. In the 19th century, many Americans traveled west because they believed those that told them that there was "gold in them thar hills", but today a different kind of "gold" is being found in North Dakota. The state is currently enjoying a boom of "black gold", and all of that oil is creating a huge number of jobs. If you are unemployed and you are desperate, you might want to check out North Dakota. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

As I write about so frequently, unemployment is an absolute nightmare in most areas of the country right now. But in North Dakota there are plenty of jobs and they pay really well. Just check out what a new CNN article is saying about what is going on in the state....

Believe it or not, a place exists where companies are hiring like crazy, and you can make $15 an hour serving tacos, $25 an hour waiting tables and $80,000 a year driving trucks.

You just have to move to North Dakota. Specifically, to one of the tiny towns surrounding the oil-rich Bakken formation, estimated to hold anywhere between 4 billion and 24 billion barrels of oil.

CNBC also recently ran an article about the jobs boom up in North Dakota. According to CNBC, there are "help wanted" signs all over the place in little towns such as Williston....

Unemployment is a national problem in the U.S., but you wouldn't know that if you travel through North Dakota.

The state's unemployment rate hovers around 3 percent, and "Help Wanted" signs litter the landscape of cities such as Williston in the same way "For Sale" signs populate the streets of Las Vegas.

"It's a zoo," said Terry Ayers, who drove into town from Spokane, Wash., slept in his truck, and found a job within hours of arrival, tripling his salary. "It's crazy what's going on out here."

If you are desperate for work and you are looking for a "reboot", North Dakota may be an option for you. According to CNN, there are a significant number of families that have already changed their lives by heading out to North Dakota....

McMullen now works as a nanny in exchange for housing. Her husband, who worked on behavior management programs for a school system in North Carolina where he took home about $1,600 a month, found a job working in the oilfields where he makes that same amount of money in one week -- adding up to an annual salary of about $77,000.

"We want to be debt-free, so we came here to play catch-up," said McMullen. "But when I came here, I thought I was on Mars. It's just so crazy that the rest of the country has no jobs, and here's this one place that doesn't have enough people to fill all the jobs."

So is North Dakota for everyone?

Of course not.

First of all, it gets bone-chilling cold in North Dakota in the winter.

If you cannot handle really cold weather then you should not go up there.

Secondly, there is not nearly enough housing in the boom towns and the housing that is available is really expensive.

So you may either have to commute a long way or deal with accommodations that are less than stellar.

North Dakota is very flat, the geography is not very pleasant, there is not much to do there, the "boom towns" are very far from major population centers and moving there would entail major sacrifices for most people.

But there are good jobs up there.

So if you are looking for some good news, you just got some.

Look, it is better to try to do something than to sit around waiting for Barack Obama to save you. As I have written about previously, the Obama jobs plan is a bad joke and even if it got through Congress it would do very little to create jobs.

The truth is that Barack Obama simply does not know what he is doing when it comes to jobs. He continues to push for even more job-killing "free trade" agreements that will result in millions more American jobs being shipped overseas.

Barack Obama continues to run around the country talking about "infrastructure jobs", but according to ABC News, thousands upon thousands of those jobs are actually going to Chinese workers....

In New York there is a $400 million renovation project on the Alexander Hamilton Bridge.

In California, there is a $7.2 billion project to rebuild the Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco and Oakland.

In Alaska, there is a proposal for a $190 million bridge project.

These projects sound like steps in the right direction, but much of the work is going to Chinese government-owned firms.

The sad truth is that the U.S. economy continues to slide even further down the tubes and the vast majority of our politicians have no idea how to fix things.

When Barack Obama first took office, the official U.S. unemployment rate was 7.6 percent. Today it is 9.1 percent.

There are less jobs in the United States today than there were a decade ago, and the number of good paying jobs continues to shrink.

In 1980, 52 percent of all jobs in the United States were middle income jobs. Today, only 42 percent of all jobs are middle income jobs.

So don't sit around waiting for the economy to fix itself. There is no reason to have blind faith in the system at this point.

We live during unconventional times, and many of us are going to have to find unconventional solutions to our problems.

There are lots of good jobs in the western part of North Dakota.

If you need a job, you might want to look into it.

Reprinted with permission from the Economic Collapse Blog.

October 4, 2011

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