What the Net Increase in Jobs per Month and per Year Needs to be

Yes, there is most definitely some propaganda between the lines here.

A main message is: "Oh, the first decade of the 21st century was a strange accident that we will be researching for years and years". No, it was not an accident, but instead it was a deliberate series of errors and actions of extreme greed that was sooner or later going to crash the system. Even Alan Greenspan admitted he made errors. And the Goldman Sachs people etc. knew full well that what they were doing would eventually lead to a system crash, although it is true that they didn't know when it would happen and they were hoping that it would not happen until they were dead.

Also notable is this Herbert Hoover like announcement:

"The financial crisis is, for all practical purposes, over, and forecasters are now generally expecting the job market to turn around early in 2010 and begin creating jobs."

The financial crisis is never going to be really over for everyone except that top 1%. For 99%, the "financial crisis" goes on. For the bottom third or so, crisis is too light a word to describe their economic predicament.

Credit is still not reliably available even to established businesses with good credit histories, so how are a large number of jobs going to be created?

More than 7 million jobs are lost and more than 3 million have not been created but should have been over about the last 27 months. So the total job deficit is close to 11 million. It takes at least a 175,000 net increase in jobs for jobs to be available to those who desperately need a job. The US is not Europe where anyone who can't get a job can get basic subsistence grants. In the US, the unemployed often end up living in tents or cars.

But that 175,000 number is still pretty lame. It will take 220,000 jobs per month during the new decade to achieve a 20% growth in jobs for the decade, the minimum percentage growth in jobs standard that was achieved in all recent decades except for the one just ended.

Finally, in order to make up by 2020 for the 11 million lost jobs, it would take slightly more than 300,000 jobs per month during the entire decade, or 3.7 million jobs per year, or 37 million jobs for the decade: 26 million constituting a 20% increase plus the 11 million.

The bottom line is that if and when you see jobs going up by anything less than 175,000 per month, the job market is still depressed. Anything from 175,000 to 220,000 per month is slightly depressed. Anything from 220,000 to 300,000 per month means that the job market is no longer in recession currently, but is not restoring all of the 11 million lost. You would have to see numbers greater than 300,000 per month if most of the people who have lost their jobs are going to get them back in their lifetimes.

So if (and it is definitely if) some jobs are created in 2010, there has to be at least 2.1 million jobs created (175,000 per month) during the year or the job depression technically continues on. Moreover, there would have to be at least 4 million jobs created in 2010 or 2011 at the latest (via a "rebound") which is 333,000 per month, for there to be any chance to recover the 11 million lost jobs within the new decade.

Does anyone seriously think that 4 million jobs are going to be created in 2010 or any other year in the 2nd decade of the 21st century?

About the only way the US could possibly have created the potential for 4 million jobs a year would be large scale government investing in green technology. Obama created a fantasy in people's minds with his airy rhetoric that this would happen, but obviously it was just another falsehood from him.

The above was in response to this article.