Unemployment at 9.7%; Links on Jobs

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the jobs numbers for February this morning; find the Employment Situation Summary here.

I apologize for not keeping up with the blog for the last few days—we have been busy rushing the March/April issue of Dollars & Sense to the printers (late, but by less than usual for us!).

I have just posted an article from the new issue on military Keynesianism; and here is the editorial note for the issue, whose theme is Guns (i.e., military spending) vs. Butter (i.e., spending on jobs):

Word is out about how bad the long-term unemployment situation is likely to be. The cover story in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly, How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America, declares, plausibly, that “a whole generation of young adults is likely to see its life chances permanently diminished by this recession.”

A recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the same outfit that calls the start- and end-dates of recessions, found that people who come of age during a recession “tend to support more government redistribution, but they have less confidence in public institutions,” and tend to believe “that success in life depends more on luck than on effort.” In other words, people who grow up in a recession are more likely to wind up in depression.

In a New York Times article on long-term unemployment, Allen Sinai, chief economist for Decision Economics, gave a glimpse into how economic elites tend to think about unemployment: “American business is about maximizing shareholder value. You basically don’t want workers.” He continued, “You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to replace them.” Our vision of a future economy—one without bosses—somehow seems more sustainable than one without workers.

There is an alternative to a jobless future: government policies that support full employment, including direct job-creation by the federal government. How would this be funded? There are lots of options, including a tax on financial transactions (which John Miller assesses in this issue’s Up Against the Wall Street Journal), restoring tax rates to the progressive levels of the mid-20th century, and slashing our bloated military and “security” budgets. Now is the time to push for (many) fewer guns and (much) more butter.