Reich on the struggling economy

None of this is surprising if you consider the recurring damage done to the economy by Bush and now amazingly by Obama.

But it should sobering for lefties to hear this from a former Clinton Administration public policy wonk with some pessimism/realism about the economy: here's Robert Reich in the WSJ...

The U.S. economy added 162,000 jobs in March. That sounds impressive until you look more closely. At least a third of them were temporary government hires to take the census—better than no job but hardly worth writing home about. The 112,000 real new jobs were fewer than the 150,000 needed to keep up with the growth of the U.S. population....

Outlays from the federal stimulus have already passed their peak, and the Federal Reserve won't keep interest rates near zero for very long....

The Great Recession has accelerated a structural shift in the economy that had been slowly building for years. Companies have used the downturn to aggressively trim payrolls, making cuts they've been reluctant to make before. Outsourcing abroad has increased dramatically....

The only way many of today's jobless are likely to retain their jobs or get new ones is by settling for much lower wages and benefits. The official unemployment numbers hide the extent to which American workers are already on this downward path. But if you look at income data you'll see the drop....

This shift also helps explain why the unemployment rate for Americans with college degrees is now only 5%, while it is 10.5% for those with only a high-school degree, and 15.6% for Americans with less than a high-school diploma....

Reich doesn't pursue this angle, but in a down-turn, it's typical to release those who are relatively less skilled and those with general skills: they're (far) easier to replace.