In article , Alun
writes:

We are still down 2 million jobs since 911. Mine was one
of the ones lost in the months after the attack. I am trying to run my own
business now, but it is a hard struggle. I would go back to working for
someone else, but there are no jobs in my field. The very few job ads I see
ask for impossibly high qualifications (for me anyway!), as employers can
pick and choose from the glut of people looking for work. For example, I
have a BS and they are looking for PhDs.

If you still have a well paid job it is easy to overlook the situation, but
it's dire. Employers are not hiring at anything like the rate expected at
this stage of an economic recovery.

That's because they learned to make do with the people they had, and are
reluctant to add more now.

2.4 million jobs were lost, and only
about 400,000 new ones have been added. It's impossible to look at those
numbers and not conclude that the economy is in terrible shape. Other
economic indicators may be good, but the employment problem is very real
and very large.

Remember Ross Perot and the "giant sucking sound"?

The current administration might prefer that we all focus on security and
foreign wars, but that's because if too many people look too hard at the
employment numbers it will hurt their chances of reelection. FWIW, I doubt
that any government can really influence the economy more than a tiny
amount, but the political facts of life say that people will vote for
someone who promises to fix the economy.

Seems to me that the real problem is more fundamental. Short term fixes won't
change long-term problems.

For example, importing 57% of our oil, and letting that number rise every year,
isn't the right trend, but it's been allowed to go on because it's cheaper in
the short term than. (Please don't blame the environmental concerns of drilling
in the Arctic and similar places until you have solid numbers on what oil from
those places costs to extract, and how much can actually be extracted.)

Another example is the expectation of a trained workforce without investing the
resources in education to produce that workforce. "Resources" doesn't just mean
"money", either, though money is a big part of it.

73 de Jim, N2EY
All the White House can do is distract, or 'run interference'. The
employment stats are so bad that it's rather like trying to hide an
elephant under the rug. That's not to say that the other issues aren't
important, although personally I'm not happy about what they are doing in
either of these areas.