It Gets Worse

[jpmassar]

Unemployment increases from 9.0% to 9.1%

• Number of jobs created last month a mere 54,000 (break even is at least 100,000 more than that)
  
• Number of people unemployed for more than six months increased from 5.8 million to 6.2 million.
  
• U6 (a broader measure of un-and-under employment) did decrease from 15.9% to 15.8%
  

Somewhat bizarrely, the average

Comments

[schmengie]

out of curiosity, if you were king what would you do to deal with the jobs issue?

[jpmassar]

At this point I would embark on a massive job promotion and creation program. You've got to kickstart. If you do the math, it's just not that money.

5,000,000 jobs x $40,000 is $200 billion dollars for two years is $400 billion, less all the unemployment you don't have to pay, all the taxes you get back and the multiplier effect. We spend that much money in Afghanistan, for fuck's sake.

Pay 90% of every new hire's salary. Feed money to states and municipalities to rehire people. Create a massive WPA-like program. Pay people to become old people's assistants. Pay people to clean graffiti and pick up litter. Set up giant government factories to produce solar panels and wind turbines -- crank them out like there's no tomorrow and give them away to power companies and people whow to put them on their houses.

Just do *** something *** that will have a direct effect quickly instead of absolutely nothing that will have an effect in the short term.

[schmengie]

I generally agree with everything you say except I just dont trust government to be efficient enough to get the dollars to the people who need jobs. If we could codify that I would be in 100% agreement (oh, of course I would want it also codified that these new employees would not be allowed to unionize :-))

[barking_iguana]

+1

[ext_1460]

If (part of) the problem is that hiring is seen as a long-term risk, you'd expect to see fewer employed at higher wages.

In many cases, the marginal cost and risk of adding a new employee can be much higher than their wages. It's fairly expensive to fire someone if they don't work out, and if you're anywhere near a threshold (or fear you will be next time your state assembly meets), you could be subject to large compliance costs.

I don't think this can be fixed by subsidies or short-term incentives.