I'll try to put together a policy change type post.

I think writing up a series of posts on what policies, very specific, very exact, do we need right this moment to create good paying American jobs.

I'm going to try to write up a post this weekend on it, but maybe others want to do that.

This is the bottom line for me is Congress/Administration has ignored a lot of policies that are needed because it's not what corporate lobbyists and other nations want them to do....but to me, it's our country damn it and obviously from today, yes folks, you cannot have a strong economy with these levels of unemployment, as much as you wish it were not so!

From Dan Froomkin:

This situation creates no sense of urgency in Washington. Ask Summers what he's going to do about it, for instance, and he hems and haws about recovery act programs that have yet to take full effect. To our political elite, jobs are simply nowhere near as critical an issue as the other economic indicators, the stock market, or the financial health of the nation's top bankers.

RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.

Your post and my post approach the unemployment news from different perspectives. So having two posts make sense in this case.

I think its become obvious that the so-called recovery has stalled. Lots of economic indicators turned down the last two weeks.
Just today, factory orders went negative when the markets expected them to be flat.
Yesterday the ISM came in low, and vehicle sales disappointed.
On Wednesday the PMI came in extremely low. On Tuesday consumer confidence dropped when it was expected to rise.
Last Friday durable goods orders dropped like a rock and new homes sales came in lower than expected. Last Thursday existing homes sales unexpectedly dropped. Last Monday the leading indicators came in lower than expected.

There is a trend developing that shows the so-called recovery is stalling, but you don't see anyone reporting it yet.

Boy, that just sucks. I know the deal when one just needs a job to make rent, yet you're overqualified, you get rejected, even though you can blow past others. Frankly, dumb down your resume. Then, there are jobs, which are cash under the table, sometimes you can dig out, just to get some cash. craigslist is notorious to have some of these listed, or you can just put up a post in "services" on craigslist, or print out some fliers from your computer, or get some cheap "side business" service business cards printed up in some skill areas you are good at. These are all just trying to get some side cash.

Then, consider moving, or temporarily going to another part of the country. There are still some areas which are hot tourist (hotel) areas I think, these are the more remote places where there is not a large population, so they have a harder time finding people.

I'm just throwing out some survival model type hints because I know perfectly good hard working people are getting royally screwed right now and it's getting to be pretty damn desperate.

Oh yeah, blast off a nasty letter to the white house and your congress reps as well as your state reps and demand to know where those Stimulus jobs are because you need one.

I wish I could offer more help, but maybe some of these tidbits are useful. Maybe some others have a few.

Yesterday, some traditional business media outlets were talking about recovery with the quarterly improvement in consumption. Then today.

From EPI:

Since the start of the recession in December 2007, an estimated 8.0 million jobs have been lost. This number includes both the 7.2 million jobs lost in the payroll data as currently published plus the announced preliminary benchmark revision of -824,000 jobs to last March’s employment level. And even this number understates the magnitude of the hole in the labor market by failing to take into account the fact that the population is always growing. To keep up with population growth, the economy needs to add approximately 127,000 jobs every month, which translates into 2.7 million jobs over the 21 months since the start of the recession. This means the labor market is currently 10.7 million jobs below what's needed to return to the pre-recession unemployment rate. To demonstrate how large this gap is and the level of growth needed to bridge it, consider the following: in order to fully fill in the gap in the labor market by September 2011, employment would have to increase by an average of 573,000 jobs every month for the next two years straight.

"It's the level, stupid.."

RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.

I guess you wrote up this while I was putting mine together.

No matter, I think we can handle two posts on this one!

Well, so much for all of those talking about this great "V" shaped recovery.

This is horrific. U6 is 17%! Now we have your analysis on how they are just reducing the total count by 1.5 million!

I have something that drives me nuts. The 2002 "jobless recovery". To me, that was no recovery. It was the housing bubble emerging to mask the collapse of the dot con bubble.

Seriously, how can they call finding another bubble a recovery, ignoring the unemployment rates...i.e. the U.S. worker, middle class is just getting hammered and still they do not have very specific policies for jobs for U.S. workers, U.S. workers preferred. It messes up their global labor arbitrage agenda, so ....we cannot get what we really need, which is kind of a WPA type program but for U.S. workers, preferred at minimum.

I am no economist but it would seem to me that rate of change is everything. These levels that some refer to are of some interest, of course, but they do not tell the whole story. Most of us want to know what will happen over the next six month to a year. What is going to change. We want to know how life will change for us by next year. online casino

While I'm not the first to point this out, it should be repeated as often as possible: the difference between the Last Great Depression, and the Neverending Great Depression we are entering, is that the last time around, after the collapse of the banking system, there was pushback by the people, via Roosevelt and his administration, against the banksters (then called the "Money Trust").

This time around, when the banking system collapsed in 2007, the banksters took over (as in the US gov't, Treasury, etc.) --- quite an important distinction!