Posted on 05/07/2010 5:17:56 PM PDT by NCjim
The betting is that the Labor Department's Friday snapshot of the job market will show that employers added workers in April, perhaps even that the unemployment rate fell.
That would be good news, but not good enough. It's hard to exaggerate how bad the job market is. Here's one arresting fact: One of every five men 25 to 54 isn't working.
Even more alarming, the jobs that many of these men, or those like them, once had in construction, factories and offices aren't coming back. "A good guess
is that when the economy recovers five years from now, one in six men who are 25 to 54 will not be working," Lawrence Summers, the president's economic adviser, said the other day.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
I hope those are the ones that voted for "hope and change"
They all aren’t.....I was axed and I did not vote for the clown in chief.
What is the ratio of want to work/refuse to work males between 25 and 54 is?
I've pulled out the self-butt-kicker a few times. Better me giving myself a kick over a mistake than getting the boot from someone else.
Maybe he just wants men to go back to school and get a competitive edge....or not.
For real? Good for you, man!
OK. 17% unemployment for prime working years is acceptable to Presidential advisors and administrative policies?
Good to know.
ACHTUNG! ACHTUNG! You do not get unemployment pay if you voluntarily retire. (Or could it be that we have sunk this deep already?)
Anyone remember how bad the economy was under Bush when unemployment was 5.5%?
TV is totally backing Oama and if people watch or have cable and sat TV then people are a friend of the regime.
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I’m not sure I believe this.
I was in college studying business when Carter was in. They were saying the same things, that we had to get used to double digit unemployment, the new norm, the new Laffer curve etc.
I’ve always looked back on that as socialism setting low expectations of the economy so people wouldn’t be angry and shocked when the bad situation rolled on years without end because of liberal policies and agendas.
Fortunately the people didn’t buy it and voted in Reagan.
ICAB,
is that you?
The country changed a lot since then.
Back during Carter Americans were hostages to muslims in Iran.
Today Americans are hostage to a muslim in America.
The fools in NY voted for a muslim 7 years after 9-11.
Your comment has NOTHING to do with the fact that MEN AREN’T BEING HIRED. Don’t think this isn’t by design either. There isn’t a single textbook out there that’ll tell you WHY that’s happening. You’ll need wisdom and common sense to figure that out and they can’t teach you that in school.
Yes, but during the Reagan Era, there were still many jobs for men who lacked higher or even high school educations. The housing industry was growing steadily and dominated by American carpenters. There were still a great deal of factories staffed by an uneducated, American workforce. There were jobs that a man with little education could still earn a decent living at.
Those jobs are gone and short of some radical economic changes, they aren't coming back. Does anyone think the factories whose assembly lines have long since been relocated to China are going to reopen?
Right now, the "unemployable" (not just unemployed) man is a high school dropout with a criminal record. He has a low IQ and probably reads at a 4th grade level, if that. There used to be jobs for these men. Today there are few of these jobs and these unemployable men have to compete with smarter guys who have stronger work ethics or they have to compete with immigrants who will work twice as hard for a fraction of the pay. It's going to be pretty grim for a huge demographic of young men and I just don't see it changing. In history, when there was a glut of young unemployed men, they were turned into soldiers and spent on the battlefield. Today, even the Army isn't hiring these guys. We're about to see legions of the terminally unemployed men and men who have never in their lives held jobs and it's going to be ugly. We're going to need to build more prisons.
If I were some mealy-mouthed incumbent politician or smug political insider and I read that it was likely that an army of 10s of millions of men in their prime were going to be unemployed for the next 5 years based largely on the crap done by government over the past several years, I would be scared shitless.
Yep, the demographics of this country are completely different today than they were in 1980.
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