

Experts see rebounding economy shedding jobs - skmurphy
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/25/MNMR1A9PMQ.DTL&tsp=1

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jswinghammer
Right now if you include underemployment you'd probably see a rate closer to
20%. Some people who are unemployed now will probably never rejoin the job
market because of protracted unemployment.

There's a serious jobs problem in the United States right now and we need to
take a serious look at the direction we've been heading since the 30s. I'm
afraid we're going to endlessly stimulate an economy that needs to liquidate
bad debt and move on. Government involvement in the economy is not costless as
some people would argue and we need to face facts and start saving and
producing again.

I'm afraid that instead of maybe five years of painful saving and reinvestment
that the American economy won't recover for another ten years when someone
gets serious and takes some of this inflation out of the system. There's a lot
wrong with how Reagan was as President but his early monetary policy is one
thing he got right.

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skmurphy
The article makes these points about California:

"Eight million jobs have been lost nationwide since the recession began two
years ago, and by some measures workers face the worst job market since the
Depression. The average laid-off worker has been without a job for 61/2
months, a post-World War II record. Many of those workers will never recover
financially.

California's hole, deepened by a state budget mess and volatile tax system, is
far worse: Unemployment is at 12.2 percent, third highest in the nation; and
adding discouraged and part-time workers puts it over 20 percent."

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skmurphy
Key quote from Lee Ohanian
<http://www.econ.ucla.edu/people/faculty/Ohanian.html>

"It's not even a jobless recovery; it's a recovery with more job losses. The
idea of having essentially no net job creation after a remarkably severe
recession is a real pathology for the U.S. economy."

