What to do about the long-term unemployed?

The recovery will probably take hold in the next year or so - except for the folks who have been out of work for more than six months. Unless some bright idea comes out of Congress (I know, I know), these folks are likely to become a permanent underclass, something that's been plaguing portions of Europe for years but which up to now has been almost unheard of in the U.S. And of course the longer they are out of work, the harder it is to get hired. NYT reports that people who are jobless for fewer than five weeks are more than three times as likely to find a job in the coming month than people who have been out of work for over a year.

"I am so worried somebody will look at me and say, 'Oh, he's probably lost his edge,' " said Tim Smyth, 51, a New York television producer who has been unable to find work since 2008, despite having two decades of experience at places like Nickelodeon and the Food Network. "I mean, I know it's not true, but I'm afraid I might say the same thing if I were interviewing someone I didn't know very well who's been out of work this long."

Personnel managers say they're more willing than usual to give an out-of-work applicant the benefit of the doubt, but as the Times notes, old habits die hard, especially because this block of long-term jobless is actually smaller than those who were unemployed in previous recessions.

Though economists generally agree that getting the long-term unemployed back to work as quickly as possible is necessary to keep people from becoming totally unemployable, the mechanism to do so is unclear. Most forms of stimulus try to create business conditions that foster the nation's output growth, which encourages companies to hire. Output has been growing only slowly, however, and has not stoked much job creation. There have also been other indirect incentives, like a small tax break for hiring unemployed workers, but as yet their effectiveness is unknown. Direct employment programs -- like the public works projects of the New Deal era and World War II -- might be the fastest way to put people back to work, economists say. But those raise concerns of crowding out businesses and displacing other workers. Besides, such proposals, which smack of socialism to some, seem politically unfeasible at the moment.