Under Obama, the New American Dream Is a Job

There’s not much to cheer in our scrappy election campaign. We hear that more than 4.4 million private sector jobs have been added in 28 straight months of job growth, and that the president is taking “aggressive steps to put Americans back to work.” The happy talk invites a slogan from the 1984 election: “Where’s the beef?”

The assessment that the U.S. economy is “stuck in the mud,” just given to lawmakers by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, underscores yet again that there has been no recovery since the theoretical ending of the recession in June 2009. For the 80 percent of Americans who were born after World War II, this is their Depression. Post continues on USNews.com : http://www.usnews.com/opinion/mzuckerman/articles/2012/07/30/...

What we have been living through is a breakdown of the great American jobs machine. Jobs have long been the best social program, the best economic program, and the best family program in America. No longer. The jobs are not there. Unemployment today is the worst since the Great Depression.

The unemployment statistics may be mind-numbing in the effort to portray the complexities of the national picture beyond the simple—and misleading—routine headline figures. It is very important, however, that we should understand just where we are and what the figures tell us about where we are heading. The headline unemployment number focused on by the media is 8.2 percent, but that's not the real number. If you add to the headline number the "discouraged workers" not currently looking for a job, and others "marginally attached" to the labor force, the unemployment rate would be almost 10 percent. And if you add involuntary part-time workers to the headline number, the real unemployment rate would be 14.9 percent. Fifty percent of the jobs created since the recession have been part time, which generally means that these workers receive no benefits and that their pay is inadequate to enter the middle class. What we have been living through is a breakdown of the great American jobs machine. Jobs have long been the best social program, the best economic program, and the best family program in America. No longer. The jobs are not there. Unemployment today is the worst since the Great Depression.

The unemployment statistics may be mind-numbing in the effort to portray the complexities of the national picture beyond the simple—and misleading—routine headline figures. It is very important, however, that we should understand just where we are and what the figures tell us about where we are heading. The headline unemployment number focused on by the media is 8.2 percent, but that's not the real number. If you add to the headline number the "discouraged workers" not currently looking for a job, and others "marginally attached" to the labor force, the unemployment rate would be almost 10 percent. And if you add involuntary part-time workers to the headline number, the real unemployment rate would be 14.9 percent. Fifty percent of the jobs created since the recession have been part time, which generally means that these workers receive no benefits and that their pay is inadequate to enter the middle class. Another depressant has been the drop of some 40 percent in the net worth of the average American family over the last five years. These are Depression-like statistics. The baby boomers who are now entering their 60s are at the epicenter of the tragic collapse of their net worth. They have scaled down their expectations and their expenditures, particularly as they worry about their departure from the workforce.

It takes time for a slump in household net worth to fully register, but it inevitably results in a drawn-out but profound effect on consumer spending patterns, as frugality becomes the new and lasting behavior. One reaction is to get out of debt as fast as possible, and indeed the ratio of household debt to after-tax income has dropped from 130 percent at its peak in the third quarter of 2007 to approximately 114 percent today. Millions of Americans are facing a lost decade, living from paycheck to paycheck, struggling to pay their bills, having to borrow money. They face a frightening future with deepening anxiety.

Los Angeles Times columnist Doyle McManus has raised the question: Can the president persuade voters to let him keep his job when so many of them have lost theirs? The buck stops with the president, and the latest opinion poll by CBS and the New York Times suggests he is paying a price for our disappointing recovery.