The bad news of Shutdown '13 seems not to have made things worse as measured by the weekly first time unemployment claims. Well … not much, anyway. As this headline from Bloomberg puts it:
Jobless Claims in U.S. Increased Less Than Forecast Last Week
Which means things are either less bad, or not quite so good, as we had expected.
Either way … the fewer people not working, the better. In Washington and in the provinces.