Traditionally, now is a season of joy and hope. For millions of Americans, however, it's been another very rough year. Last year at this time, there were 15.4 million Americans officially unemployed, with at least 11.5 million underemployed or having given up looking for a job in the past 12 months. This year, 15.1 million are officially unemployed, and at least 11.5 million are still underemployed or have given up looking. And those numbers fail to account for millions who have not looked for work in the past 12 months even though they would take a job if they could find one.
The private sector - boosted by public stimulus spending - has created an additional 1.16 million jobs in the past year, but when you subtract the government jobs that have been lost, the number of new jobs created drops to 951,000. As Labor Secretary Hilda Solis has said, this "is not enough to keep up with the new entrants into the labor market each month," much less make a dent in the ranks of the millions who've lost their jobs in the past three years. If job creation were to double, as some economists are predicting, it would still take until April of 2014 before we match the number of Americans who were employed in 2007 when the Great Recession began.
A number of aspects of economy are looking up by standard measures that have, in previous economic downturns, presaged better days ahead. Overall growth has been positive for 18 months, and many - though far from all - economists are boosting their forecasts for improvement in 2011. Some say we'll perhaps see 4 percent growth in gross domestic product next year. An improvement, to be sure, but still well below what it took in the most recent bad recession - 1981-1983 - to bring unemployment numbers down significantly.
Despite these modestly hopeful signs, for millions of Americans, today's situation is worse than it was a year or two ago. They've exhausted their unemployment benefits if they were lucky enough to have them in the first place, they've spent their savings and they've lost their homes. Their lives have been turned upside-down. With the ascendance of a new House of Representatives dominated by politicians who want to slash non-defense spending by as much as 20 percent, these battered rank-and-file Americans are dependent on a private-sector rebound that extends beyond profit margins and hiring of temp workers.
While the Great Recession is over as measured by the experts at the National Bureau of Economic Research, here's the unrepaired wreckage:
Americans out of work for six months or more now clock in at 6.3 million, 41.9 percent of the jobless total. Thirty percent have been out of work for a year or more. Record post-World War II numbers, and, as of last month, still rising. Being jobless that long makes it harder to find work. Skills deteriorate, depression sets in, and would-be employers often wonder what underlying factors may be behind why an applicant has been without a job for so long. The longer you're out of work, the harder it is to get hired.
The latest Census reports revealed that 3.7 million Americans were added to the poverty rolls in 2009, bringing the total to 43.9 million, 14.3 percent of the population. The poverty rate for children hit 20.7 percent. Had it not been for unemployment insurance, another 3.3 million would have become impoverished. And had it not been for jobs created or saved by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, many more Americans would have fallen into poverty. By the end of 2009, the nation's median household income had dropped by $2188 over 2007.
The chart shows the growth in food stamp assistance since 1975. But it doesn't include the government's latest monthly figures, which put the number of participants as of September at nearly 43 million. The average recipient receives $133 in food stamps per month. That varies from state to state. In Hawaii the average is $216; in West Virginia, it's $111. But while food stamps make a big difference, the Agricultural Department reported this year that more than 50 million Americans faced "food insecurity" at some time during 2009. That is they lacked the resources to get enough nutritious food to thrive. About 20 million reported that, because of lack of money, they had to skip meals or otherwise cut how much they ate.
In 2009, according to the Census Bureau, 5.6 million households with income below the poverty line paid half or more of their income for rent. That was a 17 percent rise since 2007 and a 45 percent rise since 2003. The federal government considers housing unaffordable if it exceeds 30 percent of household income. One of the big problems of the recession is that demand for rental housing has risen as people have lost their homes to foreclosure. As the chart shows, the cost of buying a home has dropped by almost a third, but that does nothing to help the vast majority of low-income households.
Amid all this pain, there's been significant gain in one metric: the growth of wealth inequality. Too often the focus on inequality looks at income instead of wealth, but the distribution of wealth is more unequal than the distribution of wages and income. The chart shows the half-century upward shift in the ratio of the wealthiest 1 percent of the U.S. population to median wealth.
All this, of course, just scratches the surface.
Republicans will have a firm grasp on the government's pursestrings in the 112th Congress. That means the usual obstacles in the way of ameliorating economic problems for rank-and-file Americans will be higher than ever. Meanwhile, the plutocrats will continue tightening their grasp.
While doing all we can to make clear how neoliberal economic attitudes and policies inevitably make the situation worse for the majority of Americans, the left should be devising our own fresh ideas for how to deal with our nation's acute and chronic economic problems. Third Way, No Labels and Blue Dogs can be counted on to present "solutions" that will continue to direct us down a center-right path. Left alternatives must be robust and persuasive if we expect ever to implement them. It will, of course, take more than new ideas to root out entrenched old ones as well as to overcome the powerful people and institutions that have imposed them on us. But we can't get anywhere without first developing those ideas and finding a means of exposing them on a regular basis to a broader public than that found on a few blogs and cable programs.
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h/t to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorties, The Daily Job Update and the Economic Policy Institute.