© Geoff Lister/The Ubyssey
Eight months ago, Deborah Burnley, an administrative assistant in Baltimore, suddenly found herself among America's growing army of unemployed. Losing her job at a cash-strapped non-profit was a demoralizing and debilitating experience, she says, and to keep her spirits from crashing she's sought solace in, of all things, the bleak arithmetic of her job hunt: 226 positions applied for, six temp agencies engaged, and countless miles travelled across the region for interviews. "I try to think of it as a numbers game, that each day is basically one more step closer to being employed," says Burnley, 52. In other words, if she applies for enough positions, and meets enough prospective employers, some day - eventually - she's bound to find work. But even as she clings to that hope, Burnley acknowledges she and her husband, who also lost his job as a facilities manager six weeks ago, have depleted their savings and almost maxed out their credit cards. "It can be hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel."
Two-and-a-half years after the Great Recession was deemed officially over, that light has never seemed dimmer for the
close to 25 million Americans who are either out of work or underemployed today. Like a gaping wound at the heart of the economy, the U.S. job crisis has cast a vast swath of the population into a state of semi-permanent unemployment. At the same time, America's housing market is in a shambles and poverty is on the rise. Even if economists weren't already once again warning of another global recession, a realization is slowly setting in: the United States is suffering from an outright economic depression, and it threatens to leave a deep scar on the American psyche for decades to come. As Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and a former secretary of labour, put it recently:
"America's ongoing jobs depression, which is what it deserves to be called, is the worst economic calamity to hit this nation since the Great Depression."
Comment: Do any Sott.net readers know what Gravel is referring to here?