Paul Krugman Blog

For those of you who want to see just how bad the employment picture is getting, Paul Krugman has this chart on his blog at the New York Times: Op-Ed Columnist – Paul Krugman Blog

The key points here are twofold:

First, the entire last few years we were living through a poor to mediocre job market. The recovery from the recession of 2001 was anemic at best. I have commented on this before, but the economy throughout the Bush era became highly segregated. The upper echelon of society benefitted strongly from the tax cuts, but the rest of us really didn’t. Those tax cuts failed to stimulate the economy much at all and have left us with enormous deficits to compound our current problem. The only major statistic to show above average strength during the Bush years has been corporate profits. Every statistic relating to regular people has been poor.

Second: the loss of jobs, while it is obviously significant, hides the story that Krugman highlights. The percentage of adult Americans with a job is falling precipitously. That is creating a drag on earnings and spending of immense proportions.

Hence the urgency for getting a stimulus package together.