The Third Depression

I'm not sure how many of your caught this fascinating article by Paul Krugman about the third depression, in light of the G20 meetings of this past weekend.  It's not looking good, he says, and I would have to agree.

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.

There's good reason for that.  The leadership of the world has become overly concerned with inflation when the true fear should be deflation.  Every time the Federal Reserve meets to set the interest rates, I pray that they will increase interest, which will cause more people to save.  Instead, they are slashing it to record lows.

In 2008 and 2009, it seemed as if we might have learned from history. Unlike their predecessors, who raised interest rates in the face of financial crisis, the current leaders of the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank slashed rates and moved to support credit markets. Unlike governments of the past, which tried to balance budgets in the face of a plunging economy, today’s governments allowed deficits to rise. And better policies helped the world avoid complete collapse: the recession brought on by the financial crisis arguably ended last summer. 

Once again, I call on King Clinton to save us from the our deficit.  Why do we learn about history only to shun its lessons when we need them?

Why the wrong turn in policy? The hard-liners often invoke the troubles facing Greece and other nations around the edges of Europe to justify their actions. And it’s true that bond investors have turned on governments with intractable deficits. But there is no evidence that short-run fiscal austerity in the face of a depressed economy reassures investors. On the contrary: Greece has agreed to harsh austerity, only to find its risk spreads growing ever wider; Ireland has imposed savage cuts in public spending, only to be treated by the markets as a worse risk than Spain, which has been far more reluctant to take the hard-liners’ medicine.

In short, yesterday's dip in the stock market--to below 10,000--will not likely be the last.  Nor will it be the lowest dip before this recession/depression is over.  And what does that mean to you?

And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.

And this is true of everyone, not just lawyers.  So, put on your thinking cap and come up with a long term plan.  It seems that we will all be needing one.

 

Census Worker Horror Stories and the May Jobs Report

The May jobs report is being touted as good news by the government just like the "good news" that was reported in the April and March jobs report. Haven't found a job yet? Well, it's probably because 411,000 of the 431,000 jobs created in May were temporary Census jobs with little improvement in private-sector employment. So without the crappy Census jobs, only 20,000 jobs were created last month for the millions of unemployed and underemployed looking for a job. The decrease in the unemployment rate was because of a decline in the participation rate. This is not good.

And if you've found a Census job, there is still a chance that you will find yourself without a job within several weeks of being hired to inflate the job numbers. Yes, I know it is FOX News, but listen to one whistleblower claim the Census Bureau is using temporary layoffs to pump up employment numbers. “What they do is hire you, they train you like a few weeks — 35, 40 hours of training and give you six hours of productive work and lay you off.”



The New York Post also published other census worker horror stories that backed up Maria's claims:

* I was hired four times by the Census Bureau: spring 2009 for address canvassing; fall 2009 for general quarters verification; late winter 2010 as a quality assurance clerk; and, spring 2010 [as an] enumerator non-response follow-up. I've just been laid off. In each case I spent more time training and going to meetings than actually working. Please don't use my name, I still may be called back.

* I was hired four times, counting last year and this. There's lots of waste and poor management. I've wondered about the handheld computer (used by door-to-door workers.) I've no idea how many of these were purchased. They were only used last year in one effort and my understanding is there were a lot of problems.

* I'm in south Orange County in Southern California and I'm going door-to-door to people the Census says have not turned in their form. At least 60 percent of the people I speak to swear they've turned it in. We are supposed to visit a residence three times. (If we can't contact anyone) we are supposed to try up to three proxies (neighbors or other people) to get information on a particular resident. So basically your neighbor can report how many people live in your home.

* Everything you reported is absolutely true. I was fired three times and rehired. I earned more going to training classes than (working). Several classmates didn't get any work after completing training.

* I was hired by the Census on March 16 and my last day was April 19 at the bilingual question answering center in Rome, Ga. We had two days of training, of which one was just to get hired officially as a federal employee. I had a total of two people come by my location and ask a question -- costing taxpayers $250 per question.

* I am a Census worker. I, too, can confirm that they are checking and checking. I checked homes that have already been checked by the "enumerators." The next phase is to go and re-check the checks that we already did twice..

* It's not much better in Florida. Our first day of training was a total joke. The supposed crew leader knew nothing. She didn't even open the manual to prep herself. We spent four hours signing six pieces of paper, one of which we signed on the day of the initial test ing. The nightmare didn't end when we got to the field. No work was available so we would sit in a meeting waiting for work for hours, which went on our timesheet.

* I have personally experienced the very same thing (in Missouri)) and have said from the beginning that this is strictly political and for jobs numbers. It is a waste of our tax monies. Our area appears to be very disorganized. However, I believe that it is intentional. Just another way to increase outlays and jobs.

I'm not wasting another year of my life waiting for the employment situation to improve. My pessimism about the future seems to have rubbed off several of my friends who are unemployed or hate their slave wage jobs and they are looking into the few good opportunities abroad that are left. If you're thinking about it, do it fast before more unemployed graduates with student debt jump on the bandwagon and those jobs become nonexistent as well.

We're Still Screwed But It Was a "Good" News Day

Can we trade in Brian Williams for this guy?

I've been busy with work, plans to leave the country, and Mother's Day shopping so the little news I read from yesterday and today was enough for me to step away from the computer for a while before my head explodes. Don't you feel like you're living in an alternate universe more and more these days when you read or watch the mainstream media all optimistic about what is clearly horrible, horrible employment numbers?

This is why I supplement some of it with bloggers who don't live amongst the elite and have no incentive to lie and tell me that things are getting better when in reality the lives of nearly everyone I know has only gotten worse since 2008. But don't worry you grumpy, permanently unemployed masses. We had good news yesterday. Thanks to census jobs and crappy $8.75 an hour employment for the lowly college and law grads, 290,000 jobs were added in April and the unemployment rate is only 9.9 percent and will likely grow higher. Hooray!

The number of people out of work six months or longer reached 6.7 million in April, a new high. These people made up 45.9 percent of all unemployed, also a record high.

On the legal job front, the Jobless Juris Doctor reports that 2,200 legal jobs were lost in the last two months alone. Be sure to check out JJD's latest post on an Atlanta lawyer who used to make $250k a year now living on welfare and food stamps. The 0L lemmings who still think they can beat the odds are completely delusional.

And Subprime JD once again hits the nail on the head with his analysis that the new employment numbers are "bulllllshhittttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt":

Non farm payroll data for the month of April states that the country gained 290,000 jobs. 66,000 census workers and over 180,000 were gains from the birth/death model.

From the BLS report:
"The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for February was revised from -14,000
to +39,000, and the change for March was revised from 162,000 to 230,000."

Also, U3 measure of unemployment rose to 9.9% while the U6 measure, which is a broader measure of unemployment rose to 17.1%.

Basically, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is uses data that is just as cooked as the employment data that law schools use. Lies lies lies. Congratulations, the USA is following in the footsteps of Mao, Stalin, and other command economy nutjobs. Lets all just lie to oursleves so we can feel better about the present situation.

In reality I wouldnt be surprised if the economy added some jobs from the month prior but with so many high school and college grads entering the job force at the end of the month there just arent any places for these to enter. In addition, considering the trillions of dollars the fed and treasury have pumped into the economy, surely some stabilization would have occurred. However, within 6 months this "liquidity" will begin to dry up.

We are living in scam world people, whether it be government jobs data, inflation data, crime data, law school or MBA program data, its all a bunch of bulllllshhittttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt.

Our friend Ian Welsh (thanks for adding BIDER to your blogroll!) had this to say about the grim news both here and around the world. I prefer my journalists pessimistic as long as they are giving it to me straight:

There was an opportunity to break the power of these folks—to wipe them out, but it required calling their bluff, not caving to them. That opportunity has now passed. While the world economy remains very fragile and could go into a tailspin any time if anything goes wrong, best guess is we have another really lousy recovery and economic cycle to look forward to, if austerity measures don’t crash it out entirely. Over 80% of any gains will go to corporate profits, virtually nothing to ordinary citizens, and we’ll have another lost decade in which for virtually everyone the economy sucks.

And to end on an even more pessimistic note, I'll leave you with a quote from Felix Salmon at Reuters. H/T Correntewire.

Remember though that 6.7 million people have now been unemployed for more than six months — 46% of the total unemployment figure. We’ll literally never find jobs for all of them: many will never be employed again. Which is the real underlying tragedy of this recession, and of the jobless recovery.

Clearly all the hoopla over the April employment data was just more kabuki from the media to make really, really bad news sound kinda hopeful and optimistic. In short, those of us who are unemployed or underemployed are still screwed and will be for a long time. And with that I'll go back to selling books and music on Amazon (I'm not the only one!).

Late Night Pessimism/Realism

For those of you who enjoyed Ian Welsh's last interview, here is another interview I came across on his blog today. Enjoy and sweet dreams.

Book Giveaway: ECONned

ECONned was a fascinating read. The book clearly laid out critical concepts involved with the current financial disaster, the shift in economic theory to conservative “free markets” ideology, and the “deterioration of conduct in the financial arena”. For someone like myself with zero background in economic theory to actually enjoy a book like this is a testimony to Yves Smith’s ability to break down complex economic analysis in layman’s term. It's also another reason why her blog is a must read for everyone who wants to learn more about financial markets and its enablers in government and finance.



I chose ECONned for our first book giveaway because I saw the appeal for our readers interested in how young people are scammed into taking out massive private loans in an economy with stagnating wages and debt slaves holding onto the last vestiges of the middle class lifestyle. But that is just one part of a much larger scam being run on not just us but also our friends, family, and neighbors. It is obligatory for everyone regardless of your educational background to understand how hardworking Americans were conned by financial firms and their enablers before we begin to see the big picture and how that is tied to much of the free market education propaganda that has led to the education, economic inequality, and insane tuition rates we've discussed at this blog. So that when you see a cartoon like this, all of your knowledge will make that little light bulb go off in your head and you can quickly file it under partisan propaganda: comparing 2010 health insurance windfall reform to social security and medicare is an insult to FDR and LBJ.


As Smith states in her book, it is necessary to call the resulting extortion, capture, looting, and propaganda from libertarian idealism/Mussolini-style corporatism by its proper name in order to root out the problem. If we won’t educate ourselves to separate truth from propaganda, the ruling class will continue to con and loot for as long as possible until there is nothing left to take. Smith makes that clear in her many examples from the Mexico banking crisis in 1994, a microcosm of our current situation – deregulation unleashing predatory behavior – to the growing scandals on Wall Street in the 1990s and 2000s including the Salomon Brothers Treasury bond fraud and the current financial crisis that began in 2007 with policy makers such as Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geither still in power despite helping create the meltdown in their past positions.


I read BDBlue’s book review of ECONned at Corrente and thought s/he was spot on in pointing out how free markets and libertarian ideology has dangerously made its way into the neoliberal lexicon. We see it in Obama’s education policy as BDBlue points out and as I had noted in one of Angel’s posts on Secretary of the Department of Education Arne Duncan in February. The discussion also noted a passage which caught my attention and is something that Ian Welsh brought up in his radio interview at 00:28:00-00:30:15 about how even rich people who live in a unequal society suffer consequences with their health and overall lifestyle as opposed to rich people in more equal societies. It's an amazing fact that gets little attention in our country from the media or economists, but has a huge impact on our health and daily lives. Living in a free market society where people feel devalued literally makes all of us sick:

But income inequality is not just of concern to economists. A study by public health experts in the United States and abroad that was, predictably, not well publicized in the United States itself, found that inhabitants of countries with greater income inequality show lower life expectancy on average even after adjusting for differences in income levels and diet.


...Findings like this are stark reminders that framing policy choices solely in economic terms may miss vitally important considerations. After all, many people would trade off a longer healthier life against more income, but economics refuses to consider this preference. (From chapter 1 The Sorcerers Apprentices)

Some of our readers more interested in the legal aspects of economic theory and the rise of the free market system will appreciate chapter 5, How “Free Markets” Was Sold, which discusses how inculcating judges was a major avenue in promoting the free market ideology beginning in the 1980s:

While conservative scholars like Richard Poser and Richard Epstein at the University of Chicago trained some of the initial right-leaning jurists, attorney Henry Manne gave the effort far greater reach. Manne established his “law and economics” courses for judges, which grew into the Law and Economics Center, which in 1980 moved from the University of Miami to Emory in Atlanta and eventually to George Mason University.

Smith states that by the mid-1980s, top law schools developed solid law and economics programs. Oddly enough I can’t remember a single law and economics class offered in law school. Maybe it was offered as a seminar but it definitely wasn’t a major part of the law school curriculum unless you count interdisciplinary courses offered at the business school. Did anyone attend a law school that had a strong law and economics program and was it considered more liberal or conservative? I’d be interested in learning more about anyone’s experience if they attended schools like George Mason or UChicago.

…The law and economics promoters sought to colonize legal minds. And, to a large extent they succeeded. For centuries (literally), jurisprudence had been a multifaced subject aimed at ordering human affairs. The law and economics advocates wanted none of that. They wanted their narrow construct to play as prominent a role as possible.

For instance, a notion that predates the legal practice is equity, that is, fairness. The law in its various forms including legislative, constitutional, private (i.e., contract), judicial, and administrative, is supposed to operate within broad, inherited concepts of equity. Another fundamental premise is the importance of “due process,” meaning adherence to procedures set by the state. By contrast, the “free markets” ideology focuses on efficiency and seeks aggressively to minimize the role of government. The two sets of assumptions are diametrically opposed.

There is so much more to discuss but I doubt my elementary understanding of economic concepts would do the book justice. The Angry Future Expat should most definitely be reviewing ECONned instead of me because he is a hundred times more knowledgeable in the area of economics. I dropped my one attempt to learn economics in college because I couldn’t understand the foreign graduate student instructors and numbers and graphs scared me. Only in the last several years have I tried to educate myself by reading blogs like Yves Smith’s Naked Capitalism, Calculated Risk, Corrente, and The Big Picture. I highly recommend these blogs which have educated me so much more about current events, economics, and politics than any law school classroom ever did.

Contest
We have Yves Smith’s ECONned to give away to one lucky But I Did Everything Right reader. Comment or email me at hardknockslaw(at)gmail(dot)com by Thursday April 8th at 11:59pm with an answer to the following question:


What did the current Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner tell American International Group Inc. (AIG) to do while he was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York?

You can find the answer here http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/01/geithners-dubious-aig-cover-up.html

And/Or do any of the following to receive an entry:

Follow our blog publicly and receive one additional entry. Please let me know in the comments section or email that you’ve followed our blog.


Comment on a topic discussed at Naked Capitalism or in ECONned in the comments section and receive one additional entry.


The winner’s initials or pseudonym will be announced on our blog next Friday. I will contact the winner by email and they will have 24 hours to respond with their mailing address. Contest only open to US and Canada residents.

Ian Welsh on the Economy, Health Care Reform on the Ken Rose Radio Show

I've quoted Ian Welsh several times in my posts and admire his work both at his blog and formerly at FireDogLake. Here he discusses a whole range of topics from the economy to health care reform. Enjoy.

I'll be out for most of the day but I will have my ECONned post and giveaway up this weekend.

The Recovery is Here! Private Sector Wages and Salaries Increase to 2006 Levels!

by guest blogger The Angry Future Expat


Great news out of the Bureau of Economic Analysis! In fact, it looks like the proof of a recovery that we've all be waiting for. The data is out for the Fourth Quarter of 2009, and yes, readers of this fine blog will be pleased to learn that after 4 straight quarters of declines, private sector wages and salaries increased in the last three months of 2009. They are now splitting the difference between the 3rd and 4th quarters of 2006.


Wow! Of course, the population increased by about 8 million during those years, but who cares? The recovery is here! Hooray!


And the economists are thrilled, because when you factor in government spending and few other things, presto!

Incomes climbed faster than gross domestic product in the fourth quarter, indicating the U.S. expansion is gaining more momentum than growth estimates suggest.


Gross domestic income, or the money earned by the people, businesses and government agencies whose purchases go into calculating growth, rose at a 6.7 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter, Commerce Department figures showed today. GDP expanded 6.1 percent in the final three months of 2009 before adjusting for inflation.


“We’re in a recovery and maybe the recovery is a little bit stronger than we thought,” said Ethan Harris, head of North America economics at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch Global Research in New York. “My guess is the income will be stronger than the GDP data” in coming quarters.

And we all know that any "guess" out of Bank of America is good as gold.

This Is the Most Optimistic News of the Week?

When did an unemployment rate at 9.7%, 36k job loss, and a third of adults between the ages of 18 and 29 unemployed become good news? At least that is what the media is reporting today. Hallelujah! The unemployment rate held steady and we lost 36k jobs instead of the estimated 50k!!! Let's celebrate and bring out the Mission Accomplished banner, y'all!

Hold on for a second.

Economist's View has posted a list of news links about the 9.7% unemployment rate remaining steady but isn't so upbeat about the news:

There is a lot of optimism about this report due to the fact that it appears that the rate of deterioration in labor markets is slowing and perhaps even about to turn the corner. But I find it hard to be upbeat about an economy that is moving sideways, especially when the broad measure of unemployment increased, and hours worked fell.

More unemployment news from the reality based community:

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics…

Nonfarm payroll employment was little changed (-36,000) in February, and the unemployment rate held at 9.7 percent.

The number of persons working part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) increased from 8.3 to 8.8 million in February, partially offsetting a large decrease in the prior month. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.

There was a little more bad news on the BLS summary table of unemployment, which showed an increase of 139,000 in the number of "discouraged workers" who have given up looking for work, between January 2010 and February 2010.

Along with the increase of 500,000 "involuntarily part-time" workers from 8.3 to 8.8 million, there was plenty of bad news, although most of the corporate media described it as "not as bad as expected," and so on.

Some economic cheerleaders also tried to blame the bad numbers on bad weather, although the BLS had taken the trouble to shoot down this excuse before it got off the ground.

In order for severe weather conditions to reduce the estimate of payroll employment, employees have to be off work for an entire pay period and not be paid for the time missed. About half of all workers in the payroll survey have a 2-week, semi-monthly, or monthly pay period.

So unless you were a day laborer, or snowed in for at least a week, your employment status didn’t change, and snow won’t explain away the bad news.

Blogger Ian Welsh posts a great list as to why we shouldn't break out the champagne just yet in his post, Losing 35k jobs is not good:

1. Lending is down.
2. There is no reliable source of demand. Who, exactly, is going to buy lots of new stuff from American businesses?
3. The stimulus last year was inadequate and badly designed. Yes, it created some jobs and saved others, no, it didn’t create enough.
4. The 15 billion stimulus just passed is a bad joke which will do, for all intents and purposes, nothing.
5. State and municipal taxes receipts are still dropping, meaning states and municipalities are reducing spending. They don’t have the ability to print money the way the Federal government does.
6. Oil prices are still too high, hoving around $75/barrel. If there is any sort of recovery, that price will soar even higher, and will strangle said recovery.
7. The debtor states, aka: Europe and the US, are floundering and going through a period of Hooverism. Meanwhile China, a creditor state, is trying to moderate its growth so it’s only 8%.
8. It is not in China’s interest for the US to have a robust recovery, because then oil and other commodity prices will spike. Sure they can sell Americans more Walmart crap if the US recovers, but all their inputs go up as well, and why not sell crap to their own people and other Asians, instead of Americans?
9. China is using this period to continue snapping up as much real wealth in terms of resources which are in short supply or which will be in short supply in the forseeable future. They have the money, after all, and there’s no point in spending it on most US assets.

I still think there will probably be a jobs recovery of sorts in the spring. But I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m wrong. And I expect the next economic down-leg to happen by the fall.

On a side note, I'd like to welcome new blogger Brutus, Esq. to our community. Children of Debt is off to a great start, lots of snark and reality based arguments against going to law school and graduate school, so check him out.

As Public Outrage Grows, More Turn to Violence and Destruction in Protest

We'll be seeing more videos like the one above. An estimated 6.1 million delinquent homeowners will lose their homes in the near future.

Financial blogger Yves Smith discusses the possible beginning of a violent backlash, the most notable example being the man who burned down his house and flew his plane into a federal office building in Austin on February 18th:

Note that he sees his violent response to his economic plight as a political act, a blow for freedom. I am certainly not advocating this course of action. But others start connecting at least some of the dots this way, seeing their financial stresses not as the result of bad luck or lack of sufficient effort, but as an indictment of the system. Given the breakdown of communities (for instance, the fall in involvement in local civic groups and shortened job tenures, both of which lead to weaker social ties and greater isolation), the odds that the disaffected will turn to violence is greater than in past periods of stress.

Violence certainly is not the solution to our problems, but that isn't to say that the growing anger in the U.S. isn't justified. If more isn't done to stimulate the economy and create jobs, desperate people angry over the nation's economic inequality will take matters into their own hands and the results could be disastrous and deadly.

A Weekend Treat: One Nation. Under Debt. In Stress.

This is a facinating documentary about this Country's Debt Crisis.  We are
the first generation of people to do worse than their parents and this movie
goes into all the reasons why.  If you have some free time, this is definitely
worth watching.

More Bad News: Unemployment Rate is Going to Remain High For a While

Read Dan Peck's article at the Atlantic titled, "How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America". That's right, folks. This is only the beginning of the jobless era, or what the New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman fears to be a lost decade, and it's gonna last for a long time. The first half of the article focuses on young people like us who are just beginning our careers or were laid off mid-career and whose lifetime earnings have been greatly diminished, as much as 25 percent in the first year of employment, compared to luckier graduates who get their jobs during boom times:

People who entered the workforce during the recession “didn’t switch jobs as much, and particularly for young workers, that’s how you increase wages,” Kahn told me. This behavior may have resulted from a lingering risk aversion, born of a tough start. But a lack of opportunities may have played a larger role, she said: when you’re forced to start work in a particularly low-level job or unsexy career, it’s easy for other employers to dismiss you as having low potential. Moving up, or moving on to something different and better, becomes more difficult.

“Graduates’ first jobs have an inordinate impact on their career path and [lifetime earnings],” wrote Austan Goolsbee, now a member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, in The New York Times in 2006. “People essentially cannot close the wage gap by working their way up the company hierarchy. While they may work their way up, the people who started above them do, too. They don’t catch up.” Recent research suggests that as much as two-thirds of real lifetime wage growth typically occurs in the first 10 years of a career. After that, as people start families and their career paths lengthen and solidify, jumping the tracks becomes harder.

Graduates in the unfortunate position of not being able to find work since they've left school understand that they are viewed as less marketable with every jobless month. You become so desperate that you apply to $10/hour jobs even when you're worth at least $30/hour in a good economy. If you're lucky enough to get a job with benefits you stay there for the next 5 years making $10-15/hour because the $30/hour job just isn't there. Your lifetime wage growth is thus completely ruined. You stay in your dead end administrative or temp job when you should really be making six figures at a larger corporation or firm, except now you're considered "overqualified" damaged goods. Your chances of getting the job you want is permanently destroyed. Unsurprisingly, this can lead to long lasting damage on one's mental and emotional health (let's not forget those six figure loans you took out to get a degree you thought would guarantee you a job that pays more than a fast-food worker).

Strong evidence suggests that people who don’t find solid roots in the job market within a year or two have a particularly hard time righting themselves. In part, that’s because many of them become different—and damaged—people. Krysia Mossakowski, a sociologist at the University of Miami, has found that in young adults, long bouts of unemployment provoke long-lasting changes in behavior and mental health. “Some people say, ‘Oh, well, they’re young, they’re in and out of the workforce, so unemployment shouldn’t matter much psychologically,’” Mossakowski told me. “But that isn’t true.”

Examining national longitudinal data, Mossakowski has found that people who were unemployed for long periods in their teens or early 20s are far more likely to develop a habit of heavy drinking (five or more drinks in one sitting) by the time they approach middle age. They are also more likely to develop depressive symptoms. Prior drinking behavior and psychological history do not explain these problems—they result from unemployment itself. And the problems are not limited to those who never find steady work; they show up quite strongly as well in people who are later working regularly.

The article goes on to discuss how this recession has affected graduates as well as lower-income families, minorities, and men laid off from their manufacturing jobs. I believe a significant percentage of our generation has been forever damaged by these lost years compounded by taking on thousands of dollars in debt because of misinformation about the value of higher education. The toll this recession will have on our own families when some of us have children while only just beginning our careers and paying off massive amounts of student loans is unthinkable. I also believe that the economic and social damage our children will have to fix will be a daunting task near impossible.

What is the solution? Even Krugman doesn't have an answer. This isn't just something we can fix in a few years and everything will be back to Clinton-era employment levels. Not. Gonna. Happen. This is only the beginning of a very long decline for the United States and we may never recover within the next two decades considering that the the two major political parties in Washington have no interest in real change to our nation's infrastructure, economy, education and health care system.

I'm sure many of you won't agree with me on this. My suggestion is if you don't want to spend the next 10-20 years unemployed or temping, learn a foreign language and a skill that is transferable anywhere in the world, then consider leaving the country if you can. If you refuse or can't because of family or financial reasons, be prepared to suffer for the foreseeable future. Hopefully some of you out there will have an idea to fix America or create a grassroots network of people in your community who will come up with solutions to local economic problems. But if you aren't willing to wait, the only solution I have is to marry a Canadian or someone from a country that will provide your children with better opportunities to obtain an affordable education and quality health care and leave until things get better. If anyone has better ideas feel free to list them in the comments below because I'd sure like to know how we can get out of this mess.