Economists and Democrats are portraying this as good news. But note that although the job loss rate is leveling off from its steep plunge, it has not yet leveled off. 97,000 jobs were lost for February, which is not good, but is a far cry from a year ago when the economy shed over 600,000 jobs a month.
The other thing is that employment will not be back to pre-recession levels until at least 2012 and possibly longer. Republicans will, of course, scream about that while they continue to block every bill to promote an economic recovery, at least every bill that does not include a whopping tax cut for Wall Street and the very rich. When the recovery happens, it will be a weak one, for reasons that I have pointed you to before.
I think we'll be damn lucky to see a recovery in 2012. Nothing that's wrong with the economy is being fixed. Infrastructure improvements from the stimulus bill were well short of what's needed. Nothing's been done to fix the financial system. Higher education is becoming so expensive and rare thanks to budget cuts that people will be hard-pressed to take that option to "re-tool". As someone observed a while back, even the regressive trend for income distribution hasn't been changed by this downturn.
ReplyDeleteKrugman thinks this will last a decade, and Ian Welsh predicts it will last a generation. Unless the country wises up quickly and explains to our government what is acceptable, they're certainly going to be right.
My worst fear is that the end game is going to be fascism, by some party that does a Hitler and finds some convenient scapegoats for the economic problems the way that Hitler blamed the Jews, Communists, and socialists. See: Dancin' Tom Tancredo. Because the Rethugs are doing their damndest to make the country ungovernable for their own partisan advantage... but can they control the forces they are unleashing? It's hard to see how...
ReplyDeleteAdd +1 for May as it stands. I will not show up as unemployed as contract people never do.
ReplyDeleteStatistics count when you are one.
This as they say this is gonna leave a mark.
Eck!
Wonder what it is about "in the toilet" is so hard for the pols to understand?
ReplyDelete