jobs

Defense budgets go up and down.  They have ever since the end of the Second World War. We are in a build down today, one that is likely to continue for the next decade, reardless of what the Super Committee does, and regardless of the hard court press coming from the Pentagon, its allies in Congress (Chairman McKeon of the House Armed Services Committee), and, especially, the industry that manufactures weapons for the Department of Defense.

Aaron Blake and Chris Cillizza write in The Fix that President Obama almost granted me one of my wishes last evening. "There was a word missing from President Obama's jobs speech Thursday night: 'stimulus.'"  Their statement reminded me of something I wrote in December 2008 when asked about the ideal stimulus package by the Economix blog:

If I had my druthers, the word ’stimulus’ would be expunged from public discussion, along with ‘bailout’ and ‘rescue.’ These words convey the idea that, because we have so mismanaged our economic and financial affairs, we are somehow able or entitled to conjure up additional funds out of thin air to fix our problems. There are two problems with this idea.

Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf addressed the National Economists Club luncheon today in D.C. He started with the good news: "In the near term (FY10-FY12), we expect the economy to recover." However, his job outlook was grim: "More pain of unemployment lies ahead of us than behind us." That's because this recession has had much more permanent job loss than past recessions and because our recovery is likely to be weak, with subpar job growth. We've lost 8.5 million jobs so far, and it would take 11 million new jobs to reach the level we would have had if the recession hadn't occurred. He expects the unemployment rate to drop to 5% by FY13, but, "That's a long ways away."