Legal Commentary

The Crisis Not Addressed

By Big Tent Democrat

The employment crisis is THE crisis of our times. Bob Herbert on the unemployment crisis:

The evidence is stark. More than 44 percent of unemployed Americans have been out of work for six months or longer, the highest rate since World War II. Perhaps more chilling is a new analysis by the Pew Economic Policy Group that found that nearly a quarter of the nation’s 15 million unemployed workers have been jobless for a year or more.

[. . . T]he biggest threat to the health of the economy — corrosive, intractable, demoralizing unemployment — is still with us. And the deficit zealots, growing in strength, would do nothing to counter this scourge. [. . .] The crippling nature of the joblessness that has moved through the society like a devastating virus has gotten neither the attention nor the response that it warrants. [. . .] Whole segments of the U.S. population are being left behind, even as economists are touting modest improvements in some categories of economic data, like the creation of 162,000 jobs in March. Jobless workers who are 55 or older are having a brutal time of it. Thirty percent have been jobless for a year or more.

This truly is the most serious problem we face and official Washington seems not to care. It is the crisis of the Obama Administration and it is not at all clear they are facing up to it.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on April 13, 2010 (boomark / email).