A lot of the jobs lost over the past 2 years will not be coming back. Not this year or even the next.

Job recovery has to involve new industry, because the old industry is dead and buried.

Obama talks about green energy jobs a lot because that is the only way we're going to get back to full employement in this country.

I agree with J. M..

I also believe that we have focused too much on "jobs being shipped overseas". Although that matters, what about the large companies that layoff folks just because they need to makeup for losses and yet don't make sacrifices at the top? I also tire of hearing the significance of small businesses being job creators when we should be changing the tax structure to penalize large companies that layoff a set % of employees.

Large companies need to be held to the standard that they have to balance their budgets not lay people off if they want tax breaks.

Jennifer

Mr. Cesca,

What else ought we expect when we've allowed goofy television programs and radio commercials nearly dictate our American lives over, say, what, the last 70 years?

Speaking more in the abstract here than in the concrete, it seems to this writer that the diminishing availability of employment opportunities combined with the passage of more laws by our increasingly gorgeous and well dressed politicians (who, by the way, give themselves raises when they feel like it) appears to have done little else except aid in expanding the prison population and litter the American landscape with a whole lot of useless junk spanning the categories of things from hedge funds to dilapidated buildings to silly objects passed off as art. Soon enough (at the risk of sounding like some rabid and zealous nationalist, which I am not) we'll all be looking for work in China, if China doesn't get here first, and the latter aspect of this statement has already made its way here as evidenced by labels on everything we purchase as spend-crazy "consumers." The bottom line is, assuming such labels are not some sinister illusion, we have all become disgustingly lazy in what we do and how we do it; discipline is absent. Pushing buttons on computers and laptops, appliances and vehicles, tell us we no longer have to think about what we do when we do it.

The intellectual moral to this sober commentary is start thinking about what you read when you read it. Forget about those celebrities and athletes, who make tons of money, and somehow find a way to have details of their private lives materialize under the spotlight, which then serves as paltry entertainment and performances recycled over and over again in the institutional press more as a means of distraction than a means of any meaningful civic progress -- it's time to get to work and ignore the empty, sad noise of those who seem drunk and lost in their own fame.

Wake up, for chrissakes!

Joel K. Smock
www.joelksmock.blogspot.com

Let's not overlook the Silver Lining here:
At least the Dow Industrial Average should over 15,000 by then.

(Why all the complaining?)

(snark)

Sorry, dswagz, but I want the stock market to do well especially since folks like "Jim" Hensarling want to stop Social Security for us young'uns. I don't want a bloated Wall Street, but stocks are paying for my parents' modest retirement and hopefully mine, too. :)

Jennifer

I just want to add that I am not freaking about this chart and here's why: the administration didn't think unemployment would go above 8%. And here we are at 10%. I truly think this scary number is their way of over-managing expectations. They were not about to get crap for being wrong on the bad side again.

Jennifer