Friday, September 2, 2011

Jobs Report: Bleak

August is generally a slow month for all economic activity, and the unemployment numbers released this morning affirmed that: The number of people in America with jobs was unchanged for the month. The unemployment rate remained at 9.1 percent; the number of unemployed people remained at 14 million. The net change in jobs was zero.

That, of course, is another blow to the economy. We would need to be adding roughly 250,000 jobs a month in order to make a serious dent in the overall unemployment rate. That's why the Obama administration released a study yesterday forecasting that unemployment would stay around 9 percent for at least another year, and wouldn't dip below 6 percent until 2016.

To point up how bleak that is, prior to the onset of the recession, unemployment had last been above 6 percent for five months in 2003, and before that, not since September of 1994. But if these latest forecasts hold true, we could be looking at unemployment staying at that lofty level for eight whole years.

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