Not since 1984 have we passed this barrier, one many thought we would never see again. 10.2% unemployment means one in five American families have somebody out of work; real numbers of people unemployment may be nearing 20% without using all the statistical gimmicky used to keep the percentage as low as it is.
The Christmas year-end holiday season is virtually upon us. No sooner than we will wash our Thanksgiving dinner dishes than the Christmas songs will again dominate our media and the shopping bargains will dominate our retail industry. The retail industry which shudders to see what 10.2% unemployment means for year-end holiday shopping. Some five million Americans without jobs, maybe many more who have fallen off the far end of the statistical body count, will not be shopping at the local malls this year and will be hoping that they can pay rent, mortgages and for their family’s food.
This is big for next year’s off-year elections across the board. Incumbents are already watching their backs after the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections, and after Mayor Bloomberg won another term in the Big Apple, spending something like nearly a couple of hundred dollars per voter to squeak by his challenger for a too close for comfort, re-election victory.
There is a smoldering in the electorate which these unemployment numbers may help fan into real flames – they want the bums out, they want Wall St. to stop being such pigs and paying huge bonuses with taxpayer money, they want something other than this death-by-a-thousand cuts, jobless recovery that we are now officially mired in.
A lot of fears in the economic realm have now come true. The big one – that nothing has been systemically changed in our financial systems and it could all blow sky high like Fall 2008 again – looms, as we watch the banks and other financial interests spend in the hundreds of millions on their lobbyists using your tax dollars and mine to resist any systemic changes so sorely needed. And the TeaPartyites march on Washington to protest the very same government benefits that many of them enjoy living on. . . .
We are living in interesting times in the unfortunate ancient Chinese proverbial sense. Many of us wish they would become a bit less interesting already so we can move on to other things and stop this worrying and the drip, drip, drip of bad, worse and worst financial news.
Politicians do not get re-elected with 10% unemployment – too easy to blame them, whether they only inherited the mess or created it. Who really cares? It’s a mess to be sure and we’ll blame somebody – the most visible man or woman walks the plank first.
10% means a really big Ouch in our economy – it is far from just a number. Did we actually under-stimulate the economy with government intervention, as Paul Krugman repeatedly asks? Are we thinking plain wrong that government should be rescuing failing businesses and not letting the law of the economic jungle prevail? Economic historians are sharpening their pencils this historic morning.