“Structural” is dog whistle for we ain’t gonna a thing about it. Besides it’s all the fault of the jobless who, despite record efforts to get more education, are too stupid to qualify for the millions of really really really good jobs that are out there. And until all regulations are dismantled and tax rates for the wealthy and corps are zero, there will be too much uncertainty for biz to hire.

Until the children of the elite face the same bleak future as everybody else’s, nothing will change.
And they won’t.

12% in California, 12.5% in L.A. County.

CBO forecast

With modest economic growth anticipated for the next few years, CBO expects employment to expand slowly. The unemployment rate is projected to fall from 9.1 percent in the second quarter of 2011 to 8.9 percent in the fourth quarter of the year and to 8.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012—and then to remain above 8 percent until 2014.

Not everyone agrees with that ‘rosy’ forecast.

from the Financial Forecast Center
U.S. Civilian Unemployment Rate Forecast
Percent Unemployed, Seasonally Adjusted.
Sep 2011 9.0
Oct 2011 9.1
Nov 2011 9.2
Dec 2011 9.3
Jan 2012 9.5
Feb 2012 9.7 (primary season)
Mar 2012 9.9

and headed upward

Here’s the action
1. Plot these point on a graph, from the calculated risk chart.
2. X Axis starting year of the recession, starting at 1940
3. Y axis duration of the recession
4. Draw a curve and extrapolate the curve to 2007 (curve fit to the points)

The duration extrapolated to 2007 will be between 7 and 9 years.

If you use a function to curve fit the points the curve changes characteristics between 1977-1982.

eCahn, is this explicable? Why is the business cycle changing frequency in this manner?

I did this back in 2007, becuse it is clear from the calculated risk chart the duration and depth of the recessions continues to get longer as the years pass.

“Structural” needn’t be a dog whistle for we ain’t gonna a thing about it.

Darn. I guess I will have to sell my gilded lilies and my solid gold candlesticks and my original drawings by Rembrandt.

Small business, where most of the hiring must take place, is being hampered by over-regulation and other restrictions by government.

Why?

Aug 23, 2011
Hartford Busines Journal
A fifth of Congressmen have business grounding

Eight out of 10 Congressmen lack an education grounded in business or economics despite the tough and complex fiscal policies they are being asked to debate, a policy analysis group says.

The Employment Policies Institute says its new analysis reveals that just 8.4 percent have a degree in economics, and 13.7 percent have a degree in business or accounting.

The most popular academic background was government and law (34.8 percent) followed by the humanities (20.9 percent). Other subjects included science and technology (11.5 percent) and human service (4.9 percent).

“Members of Congress are expected to provide answers for our country’s spending and economic crises, but it appears many of them might have difficulty answering Econ 101 questions,” said Michael Saltsman, research fellow at the Employment Policies Institute.

“History is full of examples of elected representatives who have performed admirably without a formal academic background in business or economics, and some may have experience running their own business,” Saltsman said. “But in this current climate, with competing claims about how a particular piece of legislation will impact our economy, it’s more important than ever that our representatives be familiar with economic basics.”

Much as I appreciate the snark, well, business isn’t hiring because there’s no profit in it, and what’s more there won’t really be much of a profit in hiring for some time to come. Rather, it appears that capital, constrained by its boundless appetite for wealth, is going to devour the seed-corn of the capitalist system and then wink out, leaving a wasteland behind.

The system, then, has encountered what Jason W. Moore calls a “signal crisis,” a sign that at some point in the future its game will be up and it will be time to move on to some other form of political economy than capitalism. In the meantime, we will have to endure a long, empty interim. Gopal Balakrishnan:

We are entering into a period of inconclusive struggles between a weakened capitalism and dispersed agencies of opposition, within delegitimated and insolvent political orders. The end of history could be thought to begin when no project of global scope is left standing, and a new kind of ‘worldlessness’ and drift begins.

Capitalism needs endless growth, and the world is finite. Inevitably, then, the process of capitalist wealth extraction begins to take on the appearance of squeezing blood from turnips, and we’re beginning to see that now.

Jon
Typo in the title — Unemployement

As long as the multinationals can make serious profits without hiring in the US, they won’t be hiring in the US. It’s time to make it *very* expensive for a US-headquartered corporation to outsource, or bring goods and cash into the US.

Structural = not Cyclical = No Goverment Programs to kick start the business cycle.

Two hypothesis for this:

1. If the business cycle improves, energy prices will increase, and kill the profit in the business cycle. Thus the money looses interest in a new business cycle.

2. Outsourcing has beeen so effective, it has killed (of deferred for five years) the possability of an upturn in the US economy, becuase of lack of demand, and no job creation to stimulate demand.

20.3% in Michigan

Behaviorally it is owing to the gradual ascension & application of neolibrul economics, which has also enabled the income divergence.

Bubble monetary policy has been a prime ingredient in helping achieve it, but so has fiscal policy in many aspects.

I’m talking about what is, not what some pipedream might be.

I’ve pointed this out before, but communism was more detrimental to the environment than capitalism. At least in the U.S. some environmental regs were passed and actually enforced for awhile, once some rivers caught fire.

As for the running out of resources problem, that argument goes back quite a way. Malthus comes readily to mind (and for him the root cause was pop growth not capitalism), but there have been plenty others over the millenniums, all with different causes. All with the same outcomes. They were wrong.

History really did not begin yesterday.

On edit: If you haven’t looked at the data, corps are actually quite profitable, despite the weak economy.

As they seem to be saying the world over now: we need austerity. We need a fiscal contraction expansion (sounds like a contradiction in terms, but the MOTU like it.) So the idea is that when government gets out of the way, well then, the private economy will pick up the slack. It is the government, after all, that is holding us back and crowding out investment in the private sector. Unfortunately, the MOTU have sold this to everyone hook, line and sinker, most notably the president. But you know what? I don’t think the MOTU believe it themselves. They don’t really care about the economy. They care about taxes, so they need to cut SSMM to a place where their taxes will not go up. And unemployment is not really their thing, you know.

Let’s do nothing about structural unemployment?

Structural is a dog whistle for “Let them eat Lobster. Don’t bother me. I’m on my all expenses paid vacation”

Well, they’re really saying YOU need austerity. “We” are playing golf before we head down to the beach.

I forgot to mention one of my fave hobby horses: medical expense. Corps don’t hire for a variety of reasons; deficient demand being an important one right now.

But a structural one has been rising costs of medical benefits, which makes labor expensive. Meanwhile, capital is cheap: low interest rates, falling computer prices to name but 2 ingredients. So corps substitute capital for labor, which causes rising labor productivity, the beneficiary of which is the owner of capital, the corp. IOW, it is the profit maximizing combination of capital & labor.

The rub is that workers are also consumers, so corps are in effect firing their customers. Which has contributed to the longer recessions & shallower recoveries that you’ve seen in your charts.

Other behavioral factors too, but I couldn’t miss out on pointing out that one.

It’s the policy makers who are using the excuse that high unemployment is structural to do nothing about it. It’s not that they couldn’t do anything, it’s that they don’t want to do anything.

Eventually the unemployment rate has to go down because unemployment insurance runs out and discouraged job-seekers are cut from the labor force. This is not good economic news, however.

Factually incorrect. Anyone actively looking for work is included in the labor force regardless of whether they’re getting unemployment insurance or not. And there is also a measure of unemployment, U6, which specifically includes those who are so discouraged they are no longer actively looking. U6 is fast becoming the norm as a measure, but it only started to be measured in the 1960s or 70s, so comparisons with earlier recessions cannot be done with that measure.

eCAHNomics, I would really recommend that you read at least one of the essays in the Jason W. Moore link I provided — Moore really does address the “limits to growth” situation expertly.

I can try to provide the gist of it for you, in my own shorthand way. Sure, Malthus was also a proponent of “limits to growth” — but what I’m suggesting isn’t Malthusianism, nor is it neoMalthusianism. Rather, in previous eras the capitalist system was able to revolutionize its way out of its own tendencies to “eat up” its resource bases. Technological revolutions in these previous eras allowed for the continued capitalization of nature and thus the expansion of the system.

Thus the “limits to growth” are not some objective barrier to the growth of the capitalist system, but rather they are an objective limit to the extent to which the current version of the capitalist system will be able to extract profits from production. If there is no revolution in the mode of production, then the system dwindles and eventually suffers its terminal crisis. All appearances at present point to this outcome, because what counts for technological progress in this era is not supportive of the continued longevity of the system.

Am I making sense here?

Unfortunately for capitalism, neither the capitalist system itself (trapped as it is in a neoliberal mold) nor the current version of technical progress, is laying any sort of foundation for a revolution which would sustain the capitalist system. As the global growth rate declines, then, the capitalists invariably resort to feeding off of unsustainable asset bubbles in order to extract continued profits from a system that is actually growing less and less. This isn’t a sign of a system that is going to be around forever.

NB: As for your use of the term “Communism,” it’s necessary to distinguish between the various communisms, from the Soviet and Chinese “Communism,” which was a contender state phenomenon in which Marx’s theories were remade into a mass ideology to garner public support for state-capitalist dictatorships on the rise in an era of expanding capitalism, to primitive communism in hunter-gatherer societies, to the sort of communism that one sees in small-scale resistance organizations. The third type of communism is the only one of these which has any potential.

Ecanhnomics
Your point is well taken that their is not reason for biz to be expected to lead the GDP recovery as they are making great profits. And all the more reason for public job creation similar to the public works projects of the New Deal. Obama just is not going there.
The results are clear that a massive number of households or homeless will be left to their own devises as the safety nets are cut by the Super Congress Obama created. And the resources dry up that have been allocated to help the helpless.
So a new population of under class like the rest of the third world is evolving where might is right and no law exists in that group of poor that will be made up of the rejects from prisons, drug addicts, mentally ill and gangbangers competing for recyclables.

Another way to look at it, is that only 58.1% of adults have a job

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm

A couple years ago it was 65%. Just browsing through the archives, in 2000, 2001 it was around 67%

http://www.bls.gov/schedule/archives/empsit_nr.htm

Zero’s jobs Czar is creating jobs … in China!?!

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/ge-ceo-jeffrey-immelt-the-head-of-obamas-jobs-council-is-moving-jobs-and-economic-infrastructure-to-china-at-a-blistering-pace

It’s not that they couldn’t do anything, it’s that they don’t want to do anything.

Isn’t that why we’re here? Kick-ass activism, and all that?

structural economic problems

Some call for a “revolution in the mode of production” to remedy structural economic problems, but personally I would be satisfied with fewer restrictions on business, small business particularly.
*The IRS is a bane of small business. I’ve posted before about the punitive penalties the IRS imposes for a company that files their GD reports late.
* State taxes are equally burdensome and all different. If a company has employees in several states then it must often hire a tax specialist company to file all of its quarterly returns.
* healthcare. The US is the only industrialized country that requires businesses (under threat of penalty) to provide healthcare. The 2014 impositions are scaring the hell out of small businesses.
* ADA – requires small businesses to undergo expensive remodeling.
* There are lots of local restrictions that need to to addressed. Licenses, sanitation, zoning, etc.

I have a friend with meager means who lives in a tourist town in the mountains. She wanted to open a couple of the rooms in her house for use as a B&B. She gave up the idea when she learned about all the hoops she’d have to jump through. There are all sorts of such stories.

Why is this important? Because with fewer jobs more people will want to start their own businesses and these restrictions make it expensive and difficult. What they will probably do if they do get started and conditions don’t improve is not to hire but to outsource their production and service needs offshore, as a lot of companies are doing now.

Based on nothing substantive, just anecdotal observation, I expect these numbers to get worse, not better. Far too many citizens seem complacent, accepting and incredibly tolerant about these numbers, most perhaps buyng the rightwing memes that if you’re unemployed it’s “all your fault.”

Slightly OT, I read a well-written letter to the editor today that proclaimed that Soc Sec should be viewed & used like car insurance. It’s something that one pays into endlessly, but “if you’re good,” you never ever take the money out (i.e., you don’t crash your car, so you never get any ins pay-out). How this “citizen” came up with this theory that Soc Sec shouldn’t be tapped into, except for “dire emergency” – and in this person’s worldview, Soc Sec is NOT meant to be for retirement purposes ever under any circumstances – is up for grabs. I smelt me some Rush there.

Just saying… if citizens can bend themselves into pretzels *agreeing* that they don’t “deserve” to get their hard earned Soc Sec money back, then they’ll bend themselves into pretzels *agreeing* that the current economic depression & high jobless numbers are most likely all part of “God’s plan.” And then roll over and take it…

Go figure.

Yeah, too bad for her. This is what happens when you don’t abide by pesky regulations. And really, really too bad for the 3 year old here:

http://www.startribune.com/local/125118709.html

What they will probably do if they do get started and conditions don’t improve is not to hire but to outsource their production and service needs offshore, as a lot of companies are doing now

Perhaps, but… you were speaking about a friend living in a tourist town in the mtns who wants to open a type of B&B in her home. How does she go about “outsourcing” that to China? I’m serious. I don’t “get” that.

You make a point, but leave something out, imo. For one thing, it is accurate that truly small businesses (as in those who employ, let’s say, 50 or less can truly be hampered by restrictions AND even taxes. However, most of the “hoops” that these truly small businesses have jump through tend to be (not all) local in nature and often have little to do with our fed govt.

An issue with incessant cutting of taxes for the upper 2% & incessent cutting of regulations that inures solely and only to the benefit of the giant corporations (which are typically identified – for US Tax Code purposes – as “Small Businesses”… but there is nothing “small” about them whatsoever) – is that all this cutting & providing of tax loopholes & incentives ONLY benefits the upper 2% & mega-corporations.

Such cuts & benefits almost never inure to the benefit of the truly small business owner. The way I see it is: the truly small business person overly-identifies with mega-rich mega-big business owners in the vain belief that all their tax loopholes & benefits with trickle down to them. They don’t.

The small business owner is just another serf, and it doesn’t matter how much they vote for conservative or Tea Party politicians… they shall continue to be screwed over by the upper 2% just as badly as us DFH’s here at FirebaggerCity.

Some call for a “revolution in the mode of production” to remedy structural economic problems

Nobody’s “calling” for a revolution in the mode of production. The light bulb was not invented by petit-bourgeois political minds writing letters to the editors of their local newspaper. Rather, technological and social innovation either supports the renewal of capitalism, or it doesn’t.

How does she go about “outsourcing” that to China? I’m serious. I don’t “get” that.

Oh come on. I wrote:

if they do get started and conditions don’t improve is not to hire but to outsource their production and service needs offshore, as a lot of companies are doing now.

Obviously my friend with only a B&B probably wouldn’t have such needs, as you indicate.

The point is that other businesses who DO have such needs are demotivated to hire for needs that they do have (production and services) because of the IRS etc.

Such cuts & benefits almost never inure to the benefit of the truly small business owner. The way I see it is: the truly small business person is overly-identify with mega-rich mega-big business owners in the vain belief that all their tax loopholes & benefits with trickle down to them. They don’t.

1. You have no basis, I’m sure, for your amateur psychological analysis of small business people.
2. The “loopholes” that favor the large and not the small is an example of the many structural problems.

You just keep believing in hope & change. First it was O, then FDL. I’ve been here maybe 4 years and everything has gotten much much worse over that period, not to mention the 6 years before then. More warz, worse economy, less responsive congress, prez with every corp dick on earth up his a-hole.

I did my share of activism over the past 4 years.

I’m a forecaster. Looks like U.S. is about where Rome was after about 200 years: representative body a powerless group of rich jerks and a dictator as leader. Took another 200 years before the enemies Rome made to overrun it. No relief for the ordinary citizens of the empire in the interim.

I wouldn’t carry the analogy too far, but it does make one think.

Nobody’s “calling” for a revolution in the mode of production.

I got that from your #25.

If there is no revolution in the mode of production, then the system dwindles and eventually suffers its terminal crisis.

You have no basis, I’m sure, for your amateur psychological analysis of small business people

Believe what you want, Don, but I do have a basis for it. Most of my extended family members are truly small business owners. I’m talking about 10 different small businesses in my family, alone, plus I know quite a few other small business owners who are friends or relatives of friends.

So ya might want to reconsider before simply dissing me out of hand.

I am NOT a small business owner, it’s true, but I’ve actually *invested* in some of these businesses, worked for one of them for a number of years, and helped out in a variety of ways, such as assisting with business plans, marketing and PR.

Easy to shoot me down as a big fat old dummie hippie, I know. Guess that’s satisfying.

So shoot me down, but I speak from direct personal experience and that of my family and friends. My one BIL is a very conservative “Republican” voter, who’s all against taxes and regulations and the usual conservative “suspects.” But he is more honest (and informed) than most of the rest of my family members, and he readily agrees with what I wrote in my comment up above.

Most of the tax cuts, incentives, loopholes, etc, that so many on the right like to yammer about will almost NEVER benefit the true small business owner. They won’t. It’s because they’re *designed* to benefit the mega-rich. Disbelieve me if you want, but that’s factual.

Sure, there COULD be tax cuts and other regulatory changes that would benefit the true small business owner. I’m NOT saying those do not exist. But the preponderance of what is blathered about in Wash DC and the corp-owned media will do bupkiss for the “small person” business owner.

The “loopholes” that favor the large and not the small is an example of the many structural problems

Quite so. So what do you propose to make a difference for true small business owners?

Part of what I propose is awakening citizens from their belief that by voting conservative, all those tax cuts, loopholes & incentives will benefit them somehow. Simply stating that regulations are going to cause small business owners to outsource to China doesn’t do much to resolve the situation. What’s next?

I understand your feelings. (Feel your pain?)

What I have been trying to do is to stir up some interest at FDL that, unlike what DDayen keeps promoting, this is not your father’s recession, subject to more gov’t spending, but is a structural problem that requires changes to the system. Changes from some kick-ass activism, if you will. I really believe that. But I’m not omnipotent either, and if it doesn’t resonate with anyone then I (like you) will give up on it.

I’m not a firebagger. I disagree with much of what is said here, quite frankly, and this would be just one more thing. (dakine has accused my of assaulting the character of readers by suggesting that with no more jobs they should consider starting a business.) I respect your economics savvy, which I’m a neophyte at. If you say it’s hopeless, then it is. It seems so.

So let’s confine ourselves to forecasting — it’s fine with me. Personally, I’m retired and almost nothing they do will affect me, and if it does I’ll move across the border to Mexico and teach English or something. If I were younger I would still try to go into business in the US, in spite of the restrictions, which I’ve done before, but I’m beyond that now.

Sorry, I’ve lost interest — see my #39.

If I saw something that seemed to be working, I’d give it a try. But no activism tried here to date has worked. And most of the causes have downshifted to small bore stuff like Choi, mj, civil disobedience with less than 100 attendees.

Besides the purpose of forecasting, even though it cannot be done (a loser’s game it has been frequently & appropriately dubbed) is that one must make decisions now that will only come into fruition in the future. So throw darts at a board, flail about trying the idea du jour with hope in your heart & gumbayah on your lips, or take a hard look at what you’re up against and assess what, if anything can be done.

The “anything” must have 2 characteristics (necessary but not sufficient conditions): it must confront the actual, not romanticized, not theorized, source of the problem, and be of a MAGNITUDE to actually matter.

Lost interest? Figures.

Oh, I’m sure that the capitalists (and their client politicians) would LIKE it if technology brought us a second Golden Age of Capitalism to match the first (1948-1971). The problem is that technology today merely accelerates the march of neoliberal capitalism to its own self-destruction. See Moore’s example of the food economy in “Cheap Food and Bad Money.”

If the costs of doing things the old, non-sustainable way keep rising — as they have been — then eventually they will exceed the costs of doing things sustainably. The question is whether civilization collapses before that point.

I’m sure a lot of people might think “Oh, goody! Back to the land!” This assumes they’d actually survive the initial collapse, much less be able to find seeds and fertilizer, much less be able to see a first harvest in a post-apocalypse America.

Capitalism will never be sustainable. The MO of capitalism is that a tiny elite make money off the surplus labor of the working class (ie you and me), while depleting the earth’s natural resources. With the advent of technology, this exploitative relationship with both the earth and actual people has sped up the depletion. How do you reform a system which rewards winners (rich capitalists) and shuns losers (the rest of us)? It is impossible. Meliorative efforts to do so will end in failure, or simply postpone the inevitable.

Mutual aid and cooperative/communal resource sharing are the only means to save the human species. This does not preclude owning things, it just means we will live more simply. Markets are a dangerous delusion/illusion.