Yeah, you read that right folks. With a labor civilian labor force of over 3 million workers, the Washington DC metro area unemployment rate in April, 2011, was 5.4%, down from 6.6% in March, 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor.
http://www.bls.gov/...
After 17 consecutive months of mass layoffs in many sectors, Metropolitan Washington in April 2010 became the first major metropolitan region to turn the corner in the economic downturn, posting a higher net gain than net loss of jobs on an annual basis. During that time, while many metropolitan areas were still losing jobs, the Washington region every month reported an annual growth ranging from 25,000 to 70,000 jobs.
And those were not just government jobs:
The sectors that posted net job gains were professional and business services, up 16,600; retail, up 8,300; leisure and hospitality, up 2,900; government, up 3,800; and education and health, up 1,400. Job losses in other sectors, when subtracted from the job gains, resulted in a total gain of 25,700 jobs for the April-to-April period.
The obvious result: the housing market in DC Metro is now improving with higher rents and house prices.
Analysts say that the long-standing job gains in the Washington region have boosted consumer confidence, one reason why it is the only major metropolitan area to see a rise in the price of single-family houses on the latest Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller index.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Of course the reason for DC's prosperity is obvious: massive spending by the Federal government over the past 3 years. And while it is understandable why Republicans want to cut that Federal spending in order to defeat the Democrats and regain the White House in 2012, why is Pres. Obama helping them do that with his anti-Keynesian policies to reduce the deficit?