US Employment Shift

From a NY Times article on the changing pattern of employment during this recesson. As you can the jobs lost are in manufacturing. The gains are in service industries except for energy. So good paying jobs are gone, low paying jobs took their place. This is not good for the pocketbook of the American consumer:
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Steep recessions — and few in American history have been steeper than this one — are usually followed by vigorous, steep recoveries that include job growth, particularly in manufacturing and retailing, as people make purchases they had put off. The result is a chain reaction in which stores reorder, factories hum and workers are hired. Satisfying pent-up demand, this process is called.

But this time is clearly different. The pent-up demand is not present — not with 6.46 million jobs gone in just 18 months and hundreds of billions of dollars in wages extinguished. Credit is harder than ever to get for those who might want to spend again, and there are fewer and fewer spenders. People who do have jobs are saving (not spending) more of their incomes than they have in years, trying to replenish wealth lost in the stock market and in the declining value of their homes.

And, perhaps most important, millions of workers on short schedules will very likely get their hours back before their bosses hire new people.

“We are talking the equivalent of adding back four to five million jobs just by restoring hours lost in this recession,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic Policy and Research. “That process of adding back hours won’t start before next June,” he says, “and I’m not confident it will begin even that soon.”

Most people just don't realize how painful this recession will be. The sad think is that Bush's first stimulus back in the spring of 2008 could have blunted the recession, but he gave into "cut the taxes" and that money was saved and not spend, so no effect on preventing the gathering recession. Obama's stimulus in the winter of 2009 could have kept unemployment below 9% if it had gone to real "shovel ready" jobs, but instead a big chunk went to tax cuts to keep the Republicans happy and the rest went into a frenzy of new "pork" spending that is very, very slow getting underway, so employment is at 9.5% and will easily go above 10% this year and may reach 11% next year.

So many chances to blunt the pain, but so much politicking and money wasting instead. The American people should fire the whole lot of "politicians" they have and get themselves some statesmen whose eyes are on the health of the commonwealth and not on playing games with poll numbers and ideological bickering.