. . . and we don’t mean the Fourth of July holiday.

From the Department of Labor’s report:

In June, the average workweek for production and nonsupervisory workers on private nonfarm payrolls fell by 0.1 hour to 33.0 hours — the lowest level on record for the series, which began in 1964.
The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) increased by 433,000 over the month to 4.4 million. In June, 3 in 10 unemployed persons were jobless for 27 weeks or more.
The unemployment rate for men hit 10 percent.
When you add up the total unemployed, plus all “marginally attached workers, plus total “employed part time for economic reasons”, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers, you hit . . . 16.5 percent.

NYU professor Nouriel Roubini, the “Doctor Doom” of economists — I always wish he would wear a mask and cape when making his assessments — tweets, “Job report suggests green shoots are yellow weeds turning into brown manure. Jobs, hours, wage losses pushing down labor income.”

There was a reason the stimulus was the first major agenda item of the Obama administration; the president-elect started laying out some of the concepts before he was sworn in. Health care, cap-and-trade, even the Iraq war had to take a back seat to pulling the economy out of its nosedive and minimizing the slump.

Obama defenders will argue, yet again, that the stimulus can work, and that it will work, but that we just haven’t given it enough time. But if you had asked them when it was signed into law whether the economy would still be shedding nearly 500,000 jobs a month by June, they probably would have dismissed it. They certainly would have dismissed the idea that construction employment would drop considerably month by month; one of the selling points of the bill was that it would cause the hiring of construction workers, engineers, planners, designers, and builders for all these “shovel-ready” projects. But, it now seems, few of those projects were all that shovel-ready.

In the end, Obama put his faith in the government’s ability to spend money quickly, wisely, and efficiently, instead of, say, a one-year suspension of the payroll tax or the GOP plan to get every credit-worthy home-owner down to a mortgage interest rate of about 4 percent. Both of those ideas had their flaws, but they would have worked much quicker; instead, we’re left watching the economy get worse at a marginally slower pace, greeted each month with a new prediction from stimulus defenders that the big stimulative impact will be seen next month . . .