Wealth & Money Quote by Jerry Costello

Jobs aren’t “disappearing” in a vacuum; they’re being politically framed as vanishing everywhere, all at once, to make economic insecurity feel both undeniable and indiscriminate. Jerry Costello’s line is engineered to collapse the usual blame game - factory towns versus coastal professionals, “blue-collar” pain versus “white-collar” insulation - by sweeping from engineering to health care. That range matters: engineering signals high-skill, supposedly future-proof work; health care reads as recession-resistant and morally essential. If even those jobs are slipping, the implication is that the system itself is failing, not just a particular industry.

The phrasing is classic legislative urgency. “Every sector” is an intentional overreach: not a statistic, a warning flare. It invites the listener to accept a broad diagnosis before asking for narrow evidence. Then comes the real payload: “forcing hundreds of thousands of families.” “Forcing” shifts unemployment from personal misfortune to structural coercion, setting up policy intervention as not just helpful but necessary. “Families” widens the moral radius beyond the worker to dependents, mortgages, and community stability.

Contextually, this kind of language fits late-2000s to early-2010s rhetoric around globalization, the financial crisis fallout, and later anxieties about automation and outsourcing. It’s also a strategic preface to proposals that might otherwise sound technocratic - stimulus spending, retraining, trade adjustment, infrastructure, labor protections. The subtext: don’t treat this as isolated churn in the labor market; treat it as a political emergency with a constituency large enough to punish inaction.