About 60 percent of the fourth quarter's growth resulted from a sharp slowdown in the reduction of inventories as firms began to rebuild stockpiles depleted by the recession.

Changes to inventories added 3.4 percentage points to the fourth-quarter growth, the Commerce Department said in its report Friday. Excluding inventories, the economy would have grown at a 2.2 percent clip, the government said. That's an improvement from 1.5 percent in the third quarter.

Translation: You're not getting a job anytime soon.

I suspect a great many Americans won't understand this--how can the GDP increase at such an impressive rate, and unemployment go up?

You can thank automation for that. I just visited a rather large power plant near Houston with four gas turbine generators producing a lot of megawatts of electricity and steam for a neighboring chemical plant. There were no more than 30 people on site. There is virtually no relationship between increased production and head count in modern industrial manufacturing plants.

There is surprising uniformity of occupations between industries, since specific functions can still only be performed by human beings. The job with the highest number of openings?

Janitors.

Hey--its a job right? Of course most people want high-paying, interesting work, so we are confronted by the question--how do we create more of those jobs?

Ah! There's the rub. Those higher paying jobs are created in greater numbers by small businesses with new ideas, and thus potential for windfall profits, than from any other source--by a large margin. Having been involved with a lot of start-ups over my career, I can attest to the fact that virtually every new company creates an immediate opening for someone with a marketing background and an engineer--often several in each class.

Now consider the nature of the so-called stimulus from the Obama administration, which isn't all that different from the 2nd term stimulus plan of the Bush administration. Does it stimulate the creation of more new businesses?

Nah. Employed people get 60-80 bucks a month to help with the cell phone bill.

It doesn't take genius to understand that if you want to stimulate job growth, you have to stimulate the job creators, which means making it a lot easier for people with time, ideas and money to invest to actually start new businesses that hire new employees.

In 1996, two PhD students started a company with a little over one million dollars in investment. That company was Google, which thirteen years later, has more than 10,000 employees worldwide.

Ask yourself the question--do you think the Democrats economic stimulus is going to produce the next Google?

Me neither.