Why should the President give a rip about unemployment?

The electorate didn't.


Michael Darda, chief economist at MKM Partners, points out that “it will require a multiyear period of above-trend growth to return unemployment to more normal levels.” He speaks of the “jobs gap,” the difference between current employment levels and what they would be if a few years of catch-up economic growth had reestablished the pre-recession trend. Assuming annual private-sector employment growth of 2 percent, the average of the past three decades, we’re 14 million jobs short. And because catch-up growth never happened — say, a few years of averaging 5 percent growth, as happened after the 1981–82 recession — even if the economy returns to steady 3 percent growth, GDP levels will be trillions lower in the future than they would have been otherwise, due to the lower starting point.

But right now output growth and job growth aren’t even back to trend. And that means every month the output and jobs gaps grow a bit wider. With an economy that hasn’t hummed since the 1990s, we’ve already had one lost decade. If we begin to accept and acquiesce to the creeping new normalcy, America risks suffering its own lost generation. Someone right now needs to say “Enough” — and then back up those words with action. It would be helpful if that person were Obama.

It's what the majority wanted. The President will continue to blame everyone else while the corrosive effects of long-term unemployment, coupled with national insolvency, do the inevitable.

Enjoy!

Memed yet again.

The Seven Things You Don't Know About Me meme, from Shelly.

Fair enough, since I am a dusty, forbidding ancient codex of obscure lore and mystery.

Or something.


1. I was nominated to attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1986 by then-Congressman Bill Schuette.

2. I was previously engaged when I was an unready 23. She broke it, not me. We were the very definition of Doomed To Divorce, showing once again that He knows far, far better than I. I'm much happier now, and I hope she is, too.

3. My MSBE score was 157.

4. I owned a Camaro. 1978, forest green with the inline V6 and a Kraco cassette deck. I got it up to 105mph once, southbound on Alger Road heading for Ithaca. It was floating at that speed, and if I'd had the slightest control problem, they'd have been hosing what was left of me and my buddy into Dixie cups for burial purposes. Drunks, little children, the United States of America and certain favored young idiots with pony cars, as Otto von Bismarck might say.

5. I was voted "Most Sophisticated" in my high school graduating class, for reasons which escape reason. After all, I did spend a couple of years occasionally screaming "I got what you need!" out of the windows of that same Camaro, cruising the Alma Gut during my high school weekends.

"Least Likely to Re-offend," perhaps. No, I did not attend Ostrogoth High.

6. It is a source of enduring, if perverse, pride that my law review article featured the phrase "vomited on a screen door."

7. I double-majored in history and political science in college. Though I suspect that seems rather obvious by this point.

We interrupt this interruption for a public service announcement.




The reunion information for the Alma High School Class of 1987 can be found at this link. Bust out your Growl Towels.

That is all.