Free Republic

America has a problem. “We’re lending money we don’t have to kids who can’t pay it back, to educate them for jobs that no longer exist,” Mike Rowe of the mikeroweWORKS Foundation explains. Although the country has become ‘profoundly disconnected,’ Rowe is doing his part to change that—and it all started while he was hosting the Discovery Channel’s hit series, “Dirty Jobs.” The show was, at its core, a celebration of people who do the kinds of jobs that make civilization work. But it wasn’t until the economy crashed in 2008 that the series became relevant in ways neither Discovery...

An unusually large share of workers have been out a job for more than six months even as overall unemployment has remained low, a little-noted weakness in the labor market that analysts said threatens to intensify the impact of the unfolding economic downturn. In November, nearly 1.4 million people -- almost one in five of those unemployed -- had been jobless for at least 27 weeks, the juncture when unemployment insurance benefits end for most recipients. That is about twice the level of long-term unemployment before the 2001 recession. The problem is ensnaring a broader swath of workers than before....

A Missing Statistic: U.S. Jobs That Went Overseas By LOUIS UCHITELLE The job market finally showed some life in September, but not enough to sidetrack a growing debate over why employment has failed to rebound nearly two years after the last recession ended. The debate intrudes increasingly on election politics, but in all the heated back and forth, an essential statistic is missing: the number of jobs that would exist in the United States today if so many had not escaped abroad. The Labor Department, in its numerous surveys of employers and employees, has never tried to calculate this...