For much of this decade both Congressional and administration budget projections showed a decline in science and technology accounts of between 20 and 30 percent in real dollars. The real impact to date has been far less severe.

I'm sure that there are reasonable people that had some reasonable projections about the future of New Orleans but none of those could include not trying to rebuild the city and make it better than it was before.

While I was pleasantly surprised by the relatively high number of jobs created in April the fact is that job creation during this recovery period has significantly lagged both historical experience in recovery and the projections of the Bush Administration.