Scary Graphs

A graph unemployment lasting more than 27 weeks.

There are residual effects of long term unemployment beyond not making money and living off the government. Skills deteriorate. Careers halt. But perhaps more than all of those factors, a spirit is crushed. At first it is not totally noticeable and maybe even preferable. People were calling it "funployment" for awhile. That's all good and fine, but over time, being productive is good for the spirit. Laying about on the couch without an obvious reason for getting up in the morning is really, really tough on the spirit. See the Office last week - what has become of David Wallace, the once leader to whom Michael reported. You start coming up with awesome ideas like the Suck It.

What should be maddening is how our political leaders and pundits spin this mess. It is much, much worse out there for regular folks than the numbers indicate. 9-10% unemployment isn't telling the whole story. It doesn't factor in discouraged workers (which bumps it to over 15%) and we already know the government misreported the numbers from last quarter by over 800,000 jobs. Bad commercial mortgages are coming up and the government's only solutions is to borrow our way out of it. What's worse, we're borrowing for unproductive entitlement spending. We're increasing unemployment benefits and trying to pass massive healthcare reform. While these are nice and good things to provide for suffering Americans, they are not productive ways of spending money. They do not provide growth. And what we need is growth. What we need is to build stuff and sell it and to make profit. If we are to go into debt, it should not be for entitlements right now, it should be for infrastructure. And not "green" infrastructure, which as far as I can tell, means basically nothing. I mean roads that people can drive on and dam projects which create power or levee projects that make lands safe to build on, or invest in charter schools to improve the education of young kids in disaffected areas. This type of infrastructure which pays long term dividends and is worth the investment.

But our political class gives us mealy-mouthed platitudes on both sides. Republicans are trying to make Obama look like a fool to get back into power. Democrats are trying to buy support by making beggars of the entire country.

We are not a rich country right now. We are like a college student from a wealthy family who buys vacations, clothes, and flat screen tvs on her credit card and thinks herself rich. She figures she'll make money down the line and hedges that her parents will pay it off. But this is illogical. What if she doesn't make money down the line - it is perfectly reasonable to assume she won't. But even if she does, most of it would go to paying down her own debt. In the next ten years, even with rosy economic numbers, we still won't peck away at the debt because of the huge cost of servicing it. Her fail safe was that her parents would pay for it. Well, our parents in this case are China. Do we want to relay on them to keep us afloat? What will the long term cost of that be?