Pres. Barack Obama is given to cute vehicular metaphors about the state of the economy. We were “in a ditch,” then got out and hit a “bump in the road.” This is studiously folksy. It also vastly understates the nature of our situation.
President Obama is presiding over an unspooling social catastrophe in the form of unemployment, and especially long-term unemployment. For all those people who are chronically unemployed, it’s as if they have been hit by the proverbial car and then backed over by it again and again.
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According to the Wall Street Journal, nearly a third of the unemployed — 4 million people — have been out of work for more than a year. Almost half of the unemployed have been out of a job for more than six months, a figure higher than during the Great Depression. They may wonder when it was exactly that we got out of “the ditch.”
The statistics tell a dire, but incomplete, story. We were built to work. When we want to and can’t, it is an assault on our very personhood. A Rutgers University study of the unemployed a few years ago found, unsurprisingly, “that they experienced anxiety, helplessness, depression, stress and sleeping problems after losing their jobs.”
The insidious thing about long-term unemployment is that it builds on itself — the longer you are without a job, the harder it is to get one. The Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that the chance of someone unemployed for less than five weeks finding a job in the next month is about 30 percent. For someone unemployed 27 weeks or more, it’s just 10 percent.
For an economy so famously on the mend that it experienced “recovery summer” last year, the trend has been in the wrong direction. A Pew study notes that the number of people unemployed for a year or more increased by 25 percent from December 2009 to December 2010.
The job market is now segregated by levels of educational attainment, but long-term joblessness disregards schooling. Once they are unemployed, about 30 percent of college graduates, high-school graduates, and high-school dropouts are out of a job for more than a year. It doesn’t matter what sector of the economy they come from. “More than 20 percent of unemployed workers in every non-agricultural industry,” Pew writes, “have been out of work for a year or more.”
So here is a wide-ranging blight that affects not just people’s incomes right now, but their sense of self-respect and their futures. Yet it’s often been an afterthought for the president. He has repeatedly said he was going to “pivot to jobs.” How could he ever have pivoted off of them? To paraphrase Rahm Emanuel, a crisis is a terrible thing not to address.
Given the history of recessions driven by financial meltdowns, it was inevitable we’d have a lingering unemployment problem. All the more reason to gear every possible policy toward augmenting job growth. Once he passed his ramshackle social-spending bill called the “stimulus,” though, Obama devoted most of his attention to re-engineering key sectors of the American economy — health care, finance, energy — regardless of the economic consequences.
His economic measures were supposed to be timely and temporary, but they either didn’t work or were temporary indeed. We’ve been left with a fragile economy in the near term, while in the longer term a growing debt, unsustainable entitlements, and a senseless tax code — all of which Obama either hasn’t addressed or has made worse — threaten the vitality of the country.
Democrats may want next year’s election to be about Medicare; Republicans may have thought it would be about debt. But if current conditions hold, it will instead be about unemployment and the associated economic travails of stagnant wages, falling home values, and rising prices. There is no more natural theme in our politics than “putting America back to work.” Next year, Obama could be vulnerable to it. It’s the flashing red light of his reelection.
Want to get the unemployed back in the news? Elect a Republican as President. Whammo, stories on the plight of the unemployed will skyrocket to #1 on the Hit Parade.
Obama failed famously with his pledge to bring unemployment to 8% within a year. Should the Republican candidate in '12 commit to a target? What should it be?
Isn't there a contradiction in desiring Americans to evolve into a high-skilled labor force while maintaining their status as consumer lemmings?
Or perhaps there is no contradiction: and the smartest American workers tend to surcumb to impulsive consumer purchases and corporate America will save the day.
I guess you're right--there is no relationship. I was unaware that skilled laborers are one section of the economy and consumer lemmings are another. Never the two shall meet.
But how can consumers buy anything if they aren't laboring? How can people labor if there aren't folks purchasing things created by that labor?
Is there no overlap? Mindless workers might make for mindless buyers, but can the same be said for skilled workers when the bedrock of our economy remains consumerism?
Please forgive my economic misunderstandings as they are a product of the public schools of Texas.
Nice article, but I think you miss one element: the lengthening of unemployment benefits. In VA, where I live, CNN reports that benefits now last 72 weeks. In many states, they last 79 weeks or more. Studies have shown that the longer unemployment benefits last, the longer it takes recipients to get another job: many people only get jobs when they are forced to. We are heading for chronic, European-style unemployment levels of 8-10%. Obama said he wanted us to be more like France!
Thanks, Rich, for a good column... so much of the chatter about the economy seems to skip over the "unspooling social catastrophe".
Ice Man: I'm certain that there are people who've chosen to remain on the bench only because of extended benefits but I don't believe that that's common.
If this were true, the unemployment rate would fall and wages would rise as the supply of labor fell (due to "funemployment"). This is not happening.
I got laid off last year in California... fortunately I was in a position to move and found another job in a couple of months in another state. The max benefit in California was about $200/week. That wouldn't pay half the rent. Few people can get by for long on unemployment.
Exaggeration doesn't get any more attractive when you do it. No, it isn't worse than the great depression. It isn't even close to the great depression. Leave off economic comparisons to the great depression, just like you leave off comparing your personal sufferings to the holocaust or your political opponents to Nazis.
In the great depression, unemployment passed 20%, over twice the highest today. Unemployment remained above 15% for an entire decade. Real industrial production fell by half. The real volume of foreign trade fell 70%.
You've never seen anything like it, and you never will. Drop it.
JasonC--I was born when FDR was in the White House. Actual living conditions were far worse than today. If my father hadn't been a good hunter and brought home rabbits almost every day, the family would have starved to death in '34 according to my mother.
But if unemployment were calculated as it was in the Thirties, it has been over 15% for three years. The main difference is we are much more prosperous now. We haven't--yet--burned through the capital stock.
The second big difference is we are no longer the Americans who lived in that time. They would take ANY job to support themselves. As some other posts on this thread reveal, today's Americans are happy to take handouts and look for work only in their chosen field. Socialism has rotted the work ethic and our morals.
People have plenty of personal property to sell. Relatives have homes big enough to take people in. This is the third Obama Recession Summer. Things will continue to get worse until--if ever--we again become a free country.
Good point.. America isn't exceptional anymore because it's people have grown base and greedy like the rest of the world that cannibalized itself.
The ugly norm that we made history by slowly rejecting with the Constitution and Civil Rights struggle has crept back and become our reality again.
America is now split between people who don't care and those who pretend that with the right article or town hall meeting we can somehow have it back. But if history is any guide these long historical arches don't turn around over night. It took over a hundred years to get that great and fifty to ruin it, we need at least twenty five to even begin to turn back the tide.
What Lowry actually said was: "Almost half of the unemployed have been out of a job for more than six months, a figure higher than during the Great Depression."
That's a claim about one particular statistic. Lowry never made any claim broader than that than that. Do you have any published statistics to dispute that narrow claim? I didn't think so. Your patronizing response shows nothing more than your lack of reading comprehension.
Growth, Growth, Growth...to create private industry jobs, jobs, jobs.
This is the main agenda plank the GOP nominee must have atop his/her platform.
And Herman Cain has a great idea: Suspend taxes on all repatriated profits...billions of $ would flood America for a real stimulus, and not one dollar of debt incurred. It would jump start the economy with new investment and hiring almost immediately.
@Iceman,
You are so wrong about this - I don't know where to start. I was unemployed for over a year and looking constantly for ANY job in ANY sector - but I couldn't get one. Friends of mine with similar IT backgrounds had the same experience - and many still haven't found work. Unemployment benefit extensions meant at least we could not be homeless and that we could feed our families. Not much more than that, but for it I am grateful. So don't pontificate until you have been in the situation. The jobs AREN'T out there.
As an aside, if we stopped the outsourcing and the issuing of H1B visas, there would be many more jobs available to Americans, at least in my field. If we stopped illegal immigration, there would be many more jobs available on the entry level spectrum for Americans. Does either party have the guts to something about either situation? I doubt it.
If this economic mess changes one thing about American culture, let it be that the Bachelors degree is now defunct. Government has to promote alternatives to four years of mindless studies that are not related to you're career (particularly in the Arts) like two-years specialty schools that are popping up, heck, even internships and apprenticships.
In a global and competitive economy we can't have the majority of our workforce (those who aren't scientists, engineers, lawyers, teachers, etc.) behind by 4 years from the very beginning of their working career with a boatload of debt and few job opportunities that probably have nothing to do with that sociology or history degree that you came out with.
Secondary Education cannot be just for educaton's sake anymore, it has to be specifically geared towards finding a job in a certain economic sector.
I like this; so in addition to trying to convert millions of illegal immigrants to Democrats, you think they can, perhaps, convert millions of Republicans as well by undermining the jobs market.
Obama has also been creating tens of thousands of pages of new regulations to implement his socialist agenda. A small business is foolish to hire someone if they can't compute the "cost" part of the cost/benefit decision.
RWinks.
Perhaps you didn't see the part of my post that said ANY job in ANY sector - cleaning, fast food, customer service - anything. My friends have all done the same. At last I got a temporary job taking customer calls at a photo place, then some contract work (which entailed moving all over the the country) and now, finally, a perm job. No one, myself included, wanted a 'handout'. But we didn't want our families out on the street either.
As I said before, it's easy to make pronouncements when you've not been in the situation yourself.
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