Here is a frightening development from a macro economic standpoint. However, for CFOs, it frankly offers a shrewd opportunity to boost staff without destroying the budget.

A CareerBuilder survey of more than 2,500 employers found that more than one-quarter (27 percent) plan to hire interns during the remainder of 2010 to help support workloads.

The JetBlue flight attendant who flipped out on the annoying passenger and then slid down the inflatable slide, beer in hand, has become something of a celebrity or folk hero on the internet, including Facebook, where several pages have been created devoted to the individual.

However, as many people enjoy their cathartic glee, employers besides airlines should be taking notice, especially on a day when The Labor Department reported an unexpectedly big drop in productivity in the second quarter and just days after yet another Chinese factory tried to commit suicide.

I've avoided rehearsing the on-going debate over the bleak macroeconomic picture, because it quickly descends into endless political back and forth along with the usual name-calling, as my colleague Steve Taub and I have been discussing internally today.  But it's time to make an exception:

Is the private sector not hiring because it fears more aggressive action from the public sector, and so the public sector (read Obama administration) should leave the economy to itself, as those on the right claim? Or is the lack of private sector hiring a reflection of a lack of private sector hiring, and thus a vicious circle and market failure that requires the public sector (read Obama administration) to step in with a serious jobs program involving infrastructure, alternative energy and schools, as those on the left insist?

Not to speak for Steve, but my sense is he tends to agree with the first perspective, at least for the most part, and I can safely report that I agree with the second, and would recommend James Surowiecki's recent column to help make my case if I could find it. Since I can't, suffice it to say Surowiecki made the useful observation that the two sectors where hiring is picking up, banking and health care, are those where the government has taken the most aggressive regulatory action.

There is little disagreement that the national jobs picture is ugly. The unemployment rate stands at 9.5 percent, unchanged from June 2009. If you include the under-employed, the fed up and not looking crowd, and the frustrated college grads who decided to go back to college, the rate is probably closer to 20 percent.

However, there are some bright spots-okay, let's call them not-as-bad spots-when you break down the job data state by state.

There's a political debate heating up about companies' hesitancy to invest the cash they're sitting on.

Essentially, the Democrats--or at least those in favor of further government stimulus measures such as a jobs program or at least extended unemployment benefits--argue that companies are wary of spending because of the lack of aggregate consumer demand.

In case we-and more importantly, the Obama Administration-needed another reminder, a number of developments on Tuesday underscore why jobs is the number one problem facing most people in this country.

Not financial reform, not the oil spill (although this is a huge disaster that must be contained), not Afghanistan (another huge disaster that must be addressed).

At long last, one writer has seriously addressed the potential problems with more stimulus spending. (I sent Paul Krugman a question about this more than a week ago, via a comment on his blog, but from what I can see he has yet to address it. And Dean Baker too easily dismisses the issue, in my opinion.)

The problem is not the federal budget deficit, not at least in the short term, but the potential political fallout from bad decision making. That way, says Steve Randy Waldman, indeed lay a possible US currency crisis. And this is ultimately where Friedrich Hayek and his associates were coming from in blaming Weimar for the disasters that followed.

There's suddenly lots of talk about the possibility of a "double dip" recession, as if the economy had ever really emerged from the last downturn. 

Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism does a good job of putting the talk in perspective today. In fact, the discussion is ultimately about semantics.

For the tenth month in a row, economic activity in the manufacturing sector expanded, according to the May 2010 Manufacturing ISM Report on Business. In fact, 16 of 18 sectors within manufacturing reported growth, including paper and wood products, as well as electrical equipment and food, beverage and tobacco products.

Several factors fed into the increase. The new orders index was at 65.7, the same as April, but up from 61.5 in March. The employment index inched up to 59.8 in May, the sixth month to show growth. Similarly, both the order backlogs and new export orders indices showed slight increases in May.

More bad news on the hiring front.

CFOs say they are less likely to hire people now than they were three months ago.