There's something really scary happening in the economy right now.
Since the great recession of 2008, we've gotten a lot better in a lot of ways, and there's
a lot to be happy about.
But if you look closer, the scars of the great recession are still with us.
It probably changed the economy permanently.
The share of unemployed workers who have been out of work for a very long time is still
way higher than it was.
And this problem's been growing with each subsequent business cycle.
Long-term unemployment is way worse then the ordinary kind.
It's demoralizing, but it's not just that.
The longer you've been out of work, the less likely you are to find a new job.
Studies show that unemployed workers face discrimination from employers.
Otherwise identical resumés are less likely to get a call back the longer you've been
out of work.
Not surprisingly, when the long-term unemployed stop being unemployed it's often because they've
stopped looking for a job entirely.
That's one big reason the United States has seen this really disturbing decline in the
share of working-age men in the labor force at all.
It used to be that recessions led to a lot of short-term firing followed by rapid re-hiring.
But recent recoveries have been slower.
With much less rehiring and more people trapped in long-term joblessness.
So how do we fix this?
Well, we've got the unemployment insurance program, and it's a useful bridge for people
who need some money to get by between jobs.
But for people really struggling with long-term joblessness, it doesn't offer what they actually
need, which is a path back to work.
One option here would be for the Government to hire them directly.
That's the way the WPA helped get the country out of the Great Depression.
Another would be for some kind of much more rigorous job training and job placement program.
Either way it would be really hard to design a program, hard to pull off, but very crucially
important to solving this huge, huge problem.
And right now, no one in Congress is even talking about it.