Here's why we're in trouble

Terrific graph from Calculated Risk that lays out the staggering employment problem. It shows job losses from the start of the recession, in percentage terms, and then the pace of hiring once the recovery takes hold. For most of the post World War II recessions, there is a sharp drop and then a sharp upturn. People fired, people hired. Recessions in 1990 and 2001 didn't work that way - job losses were relatively shallow, followed by relatively shallow recoveries. The current recession shows a huge drop - biggest of all the post-war recessions - and only recently a weak upturn. If you exclude the temporary Census hires, it's even weaker (note the dotted line). As I posted earlier today from a NYT item, the economy would have to add 15 million jobs over the next four years (that's more than 300,000 a month) to bring the unemployment rate back to its pre-recession levels of 5 percent. In this kind of economy, the chances of that happening are almost zero. And that's why we're in trouble.