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Economy: Most economists agree that the U.S. left its recession sometime last summer. Yet with each passing month, the employment news remains grim. Looks like we're in a jobless recovery.
The December job numbers released Friday were of little comfort. True, November's payroll loss was revised upward to show a minuscule gain of 4,000 jobs. But December's loss of 85,000 was about twice what Wall Street expected, and the unemployment rate remained at 10%.
For key groups, the news is far worse. Teens, for instance, suffer a 27% unemployment rate. If you're a construction worker, it's little better — one in four workers in that industry are without work.
Overall, those "underemployed" — lacking either a job or not working full time when they would like to — now stands above 17%. Also last month, emergency filings for jobless benefits surged 43% nationwide — a scary statistic if ever there was one.
Since the start of the recession in December 2007, we've seen eight million jobs disappear — four million in the last year alone. The last decade was the first in memory to show no job growth at all — and that includes the Great Depression decade of the 1930s.
It's not for nothing the National Association of Business Economics now calls the recent downturn the "Great Recession." It fits.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month said Democrats will measure their success by "jobs, jobs, jobs." So far, things aren't working out. It may be, as some economists believe, that job growth will resume soon. But the bar is a bit higher than many suppose.
Each month, the U.S. adds 110,000 to 140,000 new employees to the work force. Monthly job growth, therefore, must average more than 100,000 just to stay even. And even at that pace, it'll take six years just to get back to the number of jobs the U.S. had in 2007.
Last February, after the Congress and President Obama triumphantly passed their $787 billion stimulus program, we were told it would mean 3.5 million new jobs over two years. Unless something unforeseeably dramatic happens, there's no way that will occur.
Yet there was Obama on Friday, doubling down, getting serious one more time about jobs, jobs, jobs. His answer? More stimulus funding for clean technology manufacturing.
That might be funny if people weren't hurting so much already from the administration's focus on government make-work. For the record, every program the government put in place in 2009 has failed. Yet, we keep doing the same thing, at a cost of literally trillions of dollars. This is madness to the nth power.
Most intellectuals outside the field of economics show remarkably little interest in learning even the basic fundamentals of economics. Yet they do not hesitate to make sweeping pronouncements about the economy in general, businesses in particular, and the many issues revolving around what is ...
War On Terror: Our top counterterrorism officials were "shocked" that an "individual" conducted an al-Qaida plot. They must have been asleep when the shoe bomber struck eight years ago. Are they still asleep? White House counterterrorism czar John O. Brennan and Homeland Security Secretary ...
Entitlements: While a massive health care entitlement is fashioned in secret, another one, Social Security, is running deficits decades earlier than expected. We've been kicking the can down the road. We're out of road. As Bernie Madoff found out, any Ponzi scheme depends on a continuous ...
Proliferation: Iran ran circles around United Nations sanctions last week, using the good offices of China to procure nuclear equipment from Taiwan. It's about par for Iran, but spotlights China's double game on security. For a while, China was selling the international community the line ...
It's painfully obvious the American people don't want ObamaCare and equally obvious that the Democrats, especially President Obama, don't particularly care. The Democrats feel inoculated against voter dissatisfaction because they've bought into their own wishful narrative: that voters punished them ...
Posted By: dwdrury(405) on 1/8/2010 | 10:48 PM ET
Want evidence the Lamestream Media is in the pockets of the likes of Pelosi and Reid? Look no further than the economy. Until Pelosi and Reid took power, the economy was OK. Not great, had some problems, but doing OK. Dems get put in power, Schumer and Rangel talk for weeks about raising taxes, and pretty soon no one's investing, and the bubble collapses. Yet Bush gets the blame from the major media while all the evidence squarely fingers the Dumb-o-crats.
Posted By: niteski(280) on 1/8/2010 | 9:00 PM ET
Spot on I work financing 100's of small businesses. The ones that are not suffering from loss of sales, layoffs and the such cannot get anyone to look at restructuring debt so they can expand of grow. Further they have no ability to plan or even know what tomorrow will bring, so they must just sit a watch in order to survive.
Posted By: ajmc(460) on 1/8/2010 | 7:58 PM ET
Thank you for stating the obvious so many don't want to address. Why would any employer hire anyone except an Independent Contractor with so many icebergs floating about our Titanic economy? With fewer people having money to spend or tax, how can 'jobless' & 'recovery' be used in the same phrase? When Warren Buffett is shilling for his Nebraska Furniture Mart, you know something is seriously wrong! I don't hear the fat lady singing the end to this man-made depression for quite some time!
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