WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS? NOT MUCH, THANKS FOR ASKING!

…Kansas’s economy has actually outpaced the nation’s for years now. Throughout the 1990s and the first part of this new decade, Kansas had a lower unemployment rate than the U.S. economy as a whole. In fact, when the country’s unemployment rate dipped below 5 percent from 1997 to 2001, Kansas’s fell under 4 percent–a level so low that economists basically consider it full employment. Overall, the state’s economy added 256,000 new jobs during the 1990s, a 24 percent growth rate, compared with a 20 percent national gain in the same period. Even when the economic slowdown set in and the recession finally hit in 2002 and 2003, Kansas lost jobs at a slower rate than the national economy did.

The objects of Frank’s particular concern, his hometown of Shawnee and the rest of Johnson County, have done especially well. For three years in the 1990s, the Shawnee area’s unemployment rate actually dipped below 3 percent, making it one of the tightest labor markets anywhere.

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