It's not like the people in Fort Wayne, Indiana aren't sympathetic with America's unemployed. It's just that they're not seeing as many of them as the rest of us.
While most of the country is saddled with stubbornly highunemployment, numerous new construction projects and thousands of new jobs have made this Midwestern city of nearly 250,000 a pocket of relative prosperity.
"We've gotten not only a lot of jobs, but a lot of good-paying jobs," says Andi Udris, president of the Fort Wayne-Allen County Economic Development Alliance, "Sometimes you get lucky."
Fort Wayne added 8,000 jobs in the past year, almost half of the 18,000 it lost during the recession, including many in manufacturing. Its jobless rate has dropped by 1.3 percentage points to 8.1 percent.
That all helped to propel it to the top of the Fiscal Times' 10 Best Places to Find a Job list.
And it's not alone. There are other places with help wanted signs offering jobs with high wages. They're places like Wichita, Kansas; Worcester, Massachusetts and Twin Falls, Idaho.
That's particularly good news for the 5.9 million long-term unemployed Americans (those out of work for at least 27 weeks and still actively looking for a job), many of whom may soon lose their unemployment benefits.
Almost a third of the nation's 13.9 million unemployed haven't worked in at least a year, and nearly half are no longer receiving unemployment checks. That number could increase if Congress doesn't extend before year-end the emergency unemployment benefits of up to 99 weeks in the hardest-hit states.
Fortunately for them, hiring has been creeping up. Private-sector employment increased nationally by 104,000 in October and the U.S. jobless rate crept down to 9 percent from 9.1 percent in September.
"I think we're getting a little bit of hiring. The firing has stopped and the net is giving us a small amount of job creation,"...