Is This a Job-Less Recovery or a Job-Loss Recovery?

Special Blog Posting

In a powerful editorial this week, Investor’s Business Daily talks about our current anemic recovery with high unemployment.  They point out that today’s unemployment rate of 9.6% is actually higher that when the recession ended in June 2009, a date that the National Bureau of Economic Research just announced this week.  Then, it was 9.5%.  So, in terms of unemployment, the recession might be over, but employment has not bounced back.  Some call this a “job-less recovery.”  But, is it really even worse than that?  Let’s talk about it now …

According to Investor’s Business Daily, since the recovery began in June 2009, the economy has actually lost 329,000 jobs.  That makes this a JOB-LOSS recovery.

In fact, the American economy requires a GDP growth rate of about 3% to create 1.5 million new jobs - the number of new jobs needed on a yearly basis to keep the unemployment rate from going up even more.

The bottom line.  We’re in a recovery, but a very weak one.  It’s a job-loss recovery.  It also appears increasingly likely that if fiscal and monetary policies do not change, we might be in for a tougher year in 2011.

Choosing the Good Life Blog by Gerard Francis Lameiro, Ph.D.