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Jobs added in September
A job seeker (L) talks with a recruiter during a job fair for veterans on September 14, 2010 in San Francisco, Calif.
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Kai Ryssdal: So we got what might best be described as a perfectly OK report out of the Labor Department this morning. The number of jobs in the American economy increased by 103,000 last month. There are some statistical twists and turns, but that's a solid headline number. The unemployment rate is stuck at 9.1 percent.
Now I want you to forget about all that, wash it out of your mind. 'Cause really, in something as big as the American economy, it's not the month-to-month ups and downs you've got to worry about. Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman has the long-term forecast.
Mitchell Hartman: Now that we added more than 100,000 jobs in September, we might be tempted to cue the happy music.
The Cars' "Let the Good Times Roll"
Not so fast, says economist Kevin Hassett at the American Enterprise Institute.
Kevin Hassett: Right now, this is about as good as it gets.
Hassett thinks we'll plateau around 100,000 new jobs a month for the foreseeable future. Meaning the unemployment rate won't budge and the six million long-term unemployed won't get back on the job, says Harvard economist Lawrence Katz.
Lawrence Katz: The modest job growth that we've seen is just about what you need to keep up with population growth. It's not enough to bring people back to work.
And Kevin Hassett says we shouldn't really be surprised because this has been no ordinary recession.
Hassett: No, no, we have to compare ourselves really to the Great Depression. It's the last time that we've had this big a financial crisis at the onset of a recession.
Now, the most recent recessions in the 1990s and 2000s also had pretty much 'jobless recoveries.' But they didn't also come with a collapse of global finance and waves of consumer and business panic, so they weren't nearly as long or deep.
Hassett: In the longer recession, you tend to see cyclical unemployment become structural unemployment, because people who haven't had a job for a while had a really hard time getting one again.
Many economists now predict we could still have 8 percent unemployment in 2018, and that many of today's long-term unemployed will simply have stopped looking for good by then.
I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace.
So once again the economist/pessimist are wrong. The market was wrong. The journalist are wrong. The talking heads are wrong. There are no double dip recession. Yet no one has come forth to apologize to me.
Or apologize to America. The constant drum beat of pessimism and down right talking down of the US economy is a huge contributor to the current state.
No law, no tax cut, no jobs bill, no stalemate nor talking point will do as much as just pure enthusiasm and optimism. The fireside chat from FDR is not about employment figures or tax cuts or who was to blame or protest or class warfare. It was about our state of mind. What we need now is the All-American resolve and determination. The can-do and have-done attitude Americans are known for time and time again.
I have long considered Marketplace to be a trusted news source. But today I listened to your segment on Occupy Wall Street and found myself questioning that judgment. To dismiss the protesters as a freak show is to report from a privileged perspective with the inclination and ability to marginalize viewpoints that are different than your own. That is not an editorial position made by news source that is trustworthy.
