We are likely to find ourselves in the longest period of high unemployment since the Great Depression. The way out is to allow people to keep more of their own earnings.
There’s a new unemployment report out, and it shows an increase in national unemployment to 9.8%, with the “broader measure of the unemployment rate, which includes people who stopped looking for work and those settling for part-time jobs, remained high at 17% in November, the same as in the previous month.”
More worrisome still, the latest data reveal that “41.9% of unemployed Americans, or 6.3 million people, were out of work for more than six months in November. The longer someone is without a job, the harder it is usually to find work.”
Overall, the “unemployment rate has now been above 9% sinceMay 2009, or 19 months. That matches the longest stretch at such an elevated level since the Second World War. In the previous deep recession of the early 1980s, the jobless rate crept to 9% in March 1982 and remained above that mark until September 1983.”
We’re sure to break that undesirable streak.
See, Weak Jobs Data Dash Hopes of Accelerating Recovery.
There are differences between these bleak national figures and state and local measures. Wisconsin’s unemployment rate is not so high statewide, but some areas (Beloit, for example) significantly exceed both state and national levels of unemployment. In a small town like Whitewater (population 14,454), the loss of about two hundred jobs, with a gain of about a hundred back, still leaves a meaningful rut.
There’s a way out of all this, but it’s not by pretending that we can go on as we have, and prosperity will return on schedule. It won’t. The national picture will improve, but the local economy is burdened with too many centralized, excessive projects, ornaments to little more than planners’ vanity. All the jargon of modern management, every slogan spoken like an incantation, will disappoint.
Pretending, and that’s all it really is, that every expenditure of local government is necessary to preserve the local quality of life simply isn’t persuasive. Those most in need are ignored, in favor of that small, self-regarding faction that insists itself the very measure of all things Whitewater. A few hundred do not this struggling city make. On the contrary, they’re the principal reason it’s struggling.
The incremental increase in taxes, and the influx of federal dollars, would have been better used for a hundred alternatives.
As in Fantasia’s Sorcer’s Apprentice, the sorcery exceeds the apprentice.