The Jobs Recession
Posted 01/08/2010 07:11 PM ET
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.
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