Over its rel­a­tively short two and a half cen­tury his­tory, the United States has cre­ated more jobs than just about any other nation on Earth. Our coun­try became known as the Great Amer­i­can Jobs Machine. Dur­ing the past two years, how­ever, Amer­i­cans can justly won­der if some­one killed their vaunted jobs machine.

Two years after the claimed end of the 2008–2009 reces­sion, the United States is mired in the worst period of high unem­ploy­ment since the Great Depres­sion. As shown by the chart at left (taken from the Cal­cu­lated Risk Blog), we are in the midst of the only post-​​WWII period of L-​​shaped unem­ploy­ment — a sharp fall in employ­ment fol­lowed by lit­tle to no recov­ery growth. The real­ity is actu­ally worse than this chart indi­cates because the slight decrease in unem­ploy­ment over the past year is largely due to the fact that the unem­ploy­ment rate stopped count­ing the mil­lions of long term unem­ployed who have dropped out of the work­force after giv­ing up on find­ing work. Even after skip­ping these grow­ing legions of dis­cour­aged work­ers, the government’s unem­ploy­ment rate is again on the rise to 9.1% in May 2011.

 

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