Open for Business

   The government is removing restrictions on offshore drilling, cancelling limits on mining and drilling in formerly protected national parks and eliminating various other regulations that control what business can do.
   All in the name of "jobs, jobs, jobs," as the campaign slogan went.
   That's nice to hear, but the nation has been at what experts call a full employment level for more than a year, and the stock market has continued to rise -- the Dow Jones Industrial Average is now above 25,000.
   The latest jobs data from the Labor Department put the nationwide unemployment level at  4.1 percent in December, as the total nonfarm number of jobs increased by 148,000. The total number of unemployed people was 6.4 million.
   Among the major worker groups, the only group showing a jobless rate above 10 percent was teenagers, at 13.6 percent, and that was a drop from November's rate. For other groups, the jobless rates were: adult men, 3.8 percent, adult women, 3.7 percent, whites, 3.7 percent, Asians, 2.5 percent, Asians, 2.5 percent, Hispanics, 4.9 percent, and blacks, 6.8 percent. All of these figures were little changed from the previous month, the report said.
   And in a larger sense, the labor force participation rate -- the number of people in the work force who actually have jobs -- was 62.7 percent, unchanged from a year ago.
   In all, the economy is doing well. A danger, however, is that over-enthusiastic or over-confident investors have driven stock averages to an unsustainable level, prompting some economist to warn of a "correction." Read: A drop in stock prices that could be sudden and sharp.
   That, of course, means little to average workers, since few of them have any money invested in the stock market anyway.
   A  larger danger is that as the government removes restrictions on mining and oil drilling, those companies will want to hire more people to work on new projects. But if the nation is already at a full employment level, companies will have to pay higher wages to attract the workers. That's good, from the worker's viewpoint, but in order to pay higher wages, companies will have to charge higher prices, and that means inflation for workers in the rest of the country, whose wages have not risen.
   Realistically, however, investors and corporate management typically care more about stock values and profits than about worker wages.
   Meanwhile, the White House will point to the additional hiring as proof of the president's efforts to make the U.S. economy take off like a rocket. The problem with rockets, however, is that too often they fall back to earth suddenly and sharply.
   As for the stock market being a barometer of the national economy, it's more often a sign of irrational exuberance, as former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan put it.