The Dismal Jobs Picture

Unemployment has been one of the major problems with the current economic malaise. The government projected that the unemployment rate would hit 8% if we didn't do stimulus - so we did stimulus and the unemployment rate peaked at ~10% and now has settled down around 9.5%. The breadth and depth of job losses are hard to comprehend, but a picture is worth a thousand words:

The chart below shows the depth and length of job losses (in percentages) over the last half century. You can see the original at: http://calculatedriskimages.blogspot.com/2010/08/employment-recessions-aligned-at-bottom.html.

That is one scary picture!

Don't worry it gets worse. Obama's economic policies should have been generating 292,000 new jobs a month beginning in Feb. 2010 in order for the nation to hit a 5% unemployment rate by 2015! We are not even close to this level of job growth...in fact almost all the recent job growth was temporary Census workers. It seems very unlikely that the unemployment rate is going down anytime soon.