The Federal Reserve announced Wednesday a modest increase in its efforts to reduce borrowing costs for businesses and consumers by extending its existing “Operation Twist” asset-purchase program through the end of the year.

The decision reflects growing concern that the economy once again is stumbling into the summer months after the false promise of a relatively strong winter. The Fed now expects the unemployment rate to fall no lower than 8 percent this year, and inflation to rise no higher than 1.7 percent, both signs of an ailing economy.

Fed officials also have indicated a desire to insure against a pair of looming risks, that events in Europe will freeze global financial markets and that the political stalemate in Washington over fiscal policy will undermine the domestic recovery.

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The children of white middle-class, college-educated parents, Hugh Green and Turner Jenkins are just the kind of kids everyone would expect to be stepping out into the world one sunny June day, bachelor’s degrees in hand. But they both veered from the traditional American educational route.

One decided that a bachelor’s was never going to be enough, while the other concluded it was unnecessary….

Once the hallmark of an educated and readily employable adult, the bachelor’s degree is losing its edge. Quicker, cheaper programs offer attractive career route alternatives while the more prestigious master’s is trumping it, making it a mere steppingstone.

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These are anxious days for American workers. Many, like Ms. [Sherry] Woods, are underemployed. Others find pay that is simply not keeping up with their expenses: adjusted for inflation, the median hourly wage was lower in 2011 than it was a decade earlier, according to data from a forthcoming book by the Economic Policy Institute, “The State of Working America, 12th Edition.” Good benefits are harder to come by, and people are staying longer in jobs that they want to leave, afraid that they will not be able to find something better. Only 2.1 million people quit their jobs in March, down from the 2.9 million people who quit in December 2007, the first month of the recession.

“Unfortunately, the wage problems brought on by the recession pile on top of a three-decade stagnation of wages for low- and middle-wage workers,” said Lawrence Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, a research group in Washington that studies the labor market. “In the aftermath of the financial crisis, there has been persistent high unemployment as households reduced debt and scaled back purchases. The consequence for wages has been substantially slower growth across the board, including white-collar and college-educated workers.”

Now, with the economy shaping up as the central issue of the presidential election, both President Obama and Mitt Romney have been relentlessly trying to make the case that their policies would bring prosperity back. The unease of voters is striking: in a New York Times/CBS News poll in April, half of the respondents said they thought the next generation of Americans would be worse off, while only about a quarter said it would have a better future.

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Thousands of state workers could find themselves facing a life-changing decision later this month ”” whether to retire or not ”” and with less than a week to make it.

Lawmakers are poised to make major changes in the state’s Retirement Systems that would affect the more than 214,000 state and local government employees covered by that pension system.

State senators want some of the changes to take effect July 1.

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This retirement oasis in the desert has long beckoned those who want to spin out their golden years playing golf and sitting by the pool in the arid sunshine.

But for Clare Keany, who turned 62 last fall and cannot find work, it feels more like a prison. Just a few miles from the gated estates of corporate chieftains and Hollywood stars, Ms. Keany lives in a tiny mobile home, barely getting by on little more than $1,082 a month from Social Security.

“I would rather be functioning and having a job somewhere,” said Ms. Keany, whose pixie haircut, trim build and crinkling smile suggest someone much younger than her years. “I really don’t enjoy living like this. I’ve got too much to do still.”

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“I voted for [Walker] in 2010 because I realized we have to do something about the deficit. I voted for him in the recall because I don’t believe recall elections are meant for what they’re doing with it,” said Katy Tomlanovich, who teaches at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College. She said recall elections should be reserved for politicians who commit gross malfeasance, not for those who make unpopular decisions.

Tomlanovich said she plans to vote for Obama in November but cast a ballot for the Republican on Tuesday. “Scott Walker is actually doing something about [spending], and I think he should be allowed to serve the rest of his term.”

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Everyone seems to have an opinion on what the vote in Wisconsin means for national politics.

But beyond the issue of whether Scott Walker’s survival puts Wisconsin in play in November, his victory represents an example of the way politicians in our most pressed states are sorting themselves as they confront this long fiscal downturn. Increasingly they fall into two camps: those willing to undertake tough reforms in the face of severe fiscal restraints that don’t appear likely to improve anytime soon, and those who continue to put off the difficult decisions even as their states’ balance sheets deteriorate and investors grow wary of their budget instability.

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From mid-1987 until the Great Recession, the employment-to-population ratio of 25- to 54-year-olds usually ranged from 78.5% to 80%. It never fell below 78.2% even during the 1990-91 and 2001 slumps.

But now, three years after the recession ended in June 2009, that ratio stands at just 75.7%.

“This is probably a better measure than the unemployment rate,” said James Sherk, senior policy analyst in labor economics at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “There are so many people dropping out of the job market and the unemployment rate, bad as it is, doesn’t pick that up. The ratio gives a better idea of employment opportunities.”

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Job growth was weak in May. Just as bad: the type of jobs the economy did manage to add….

…the job growth is coming entirely from workers getting part-time jobs. The number of Americans working full-time fell by 266,000 in May, erasing all the gains of the past three months. The total employment figure only rose because 618,000 more people got part-time jobs. Many of those people would rather be working full-time: The number of people classified as “part time for economic reasons” ”” meaning they’re working part-time because they can’t find a full-time job ”” rose by 245,000 to 8.1 million.

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…the diversity of the Washington economy is an illusion, for each of its business sectors is to some degree a creature of the region’s single great industry–the federal government. According to a 2007 report by the Tax Foundation, for every dollar in taxes Washington sends to the federal government, it receives five in return. Fuller says that over the past 30 years, the federal government has spent $860 billion in the D.C. region, two-thirds of that since 9/11.

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The recession ended and the recovery began in June, 2009. It’s an ugly third birthday for the labor market

More than 7 million U.S. jobs disappeared during the recession. Fewer than 3 million have been added in the recovery. And the rate of job growth has been falling lately; in May, the economy added just 69,000 jobs. That’s not even enough to keep up with population growth.

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The United States economy gained a net 69,000 jobs in May, the Labor Department said Friday, a dismal showing that reflected mounting evidence of a global slowdown. The unemployment rate rose to 8.2 percent from 8.1 percent in April, but largely because more people began looking for work.

The report, which came in at less than half what analysts had expected and was the lowest number of net jobs created in a year, was potentially devastating for President Obama as he faces reelection and creates increased pressure on the Federal Reserve to expand its stimulus campaign.

As the third disappointing performance by the job market in three months, for many it served as confirmation that the economic recovery has once again lost momentum.

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Demand remains for people with complex skills, like software engineering or the ability to read X-rays. There is also demand for people to take jobs that require less skill, like cleaning and waiting tables. It’s the jobs in the middle that are being squeezed ”“ sales, administration, assembly positions, for example.

Economists have a term for this phenomenon: labor polarization.

“What’s happening is we’re getting jobs at both ends of the spectrum,” says Howard Rosen, a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

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For many Americans, [Dick Meyer, author of the 2008 book Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium]…says, the challenge of near total life freedom …has been that shedding old ties and traditions turns out to be easier than finding meaningful new ones; forming a modern ‘lifestyle’ often ends being narcissistic and consumerist.”

This choice overload, Meyer says, “has proven to be spiritually hollow. We’ve found nothing to replace community, hard morality, religion and vocational pride to guide us through life. We’re existentially in the dark.”

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The American Dream is a crucial thread in this country’s tapestry, woven through politics, music and culture.

Though the phrase has different meanings to different people, it suggests an underlying belief that hard work pays off and that the next generation will have a better life than the previous generation.

But three years after the worst recession in almost a century, the American Dream now feels in jeopardy to many….

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Baby-boomer retirements are skewing the nation’s unemployment rate, but not enough to disguise a weak economy, according to a new report.

The left-leaning Employment Policy Institute (EPI) says the slow exit of baby boomers is a factor in the declining jobless rate, and its overall conclusion is that the economy is still quite sick.

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Most states are still more than two years away from returning to prerecession employment levels, according to a new analysis.

Only four states ”” Alaska, North Dakota, Texas, and Louisiana ”” have created enough jobs since the recovery to get back to where they were prior to the recession, according to economist Steven Frable of IHS Global Insight. All four of those states have benefited from an energy boom, and Louisiana was starting at a low level of employment after taking a major hit from Hurricane Katrina.

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As Spain’s recession deepens, more workers like Juan are being shunted into an underground economy that amounts to as much as a fifth of Spain’s gross domestic product, according to some estimates, with broad implications as the country tries to revive itself, reform its labor market and keep at bay the kind of wrenching crisis that now threatens to push Greece out of the euro zone.

The happy news is that the size of the underground economy means that more Spaniards are working than it might seem, and that the official unemployment figure of 24.4 percent ”” the highest in Europe ”” may be overstated by as much as five to nine percentage points, economists say. That has given the Spanish government an important safety valve.

“Without the underground economy, we would be in a situation of probably violent social unrest,” said Robert Tornabell, a professor and former dean of the Esade business school in Barcelona.

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Defense contractors have slowed hiring. Tax advisers are warning firms not to count on favorite breaks. And hospitals are scouring their books for ways to cut costs.

Across the U.S. economy, anxiety is rising about the potential for widespread disruptions after the November election, when a lame-duck Congress will have barely two months to resolve a grinding standoff over taxes and spending.

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One out of five families owes more on credit cards, medical bills, student loans and other unsecured debt than they have in savings, according to a new University of Michigan report. And the number of families surveyed at the end of 2011 that have no savings at all increased to 23.4%, compared with 18.5% in 2009.

“The people who were down and out, without much money, in the recession have ended up staying there or even worse,” says Frank Stafford, professor of economics at University of Michigan Institute for Social Research and co-author of the report.

And the mortgage crisis is not over.

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Some parents are not content to help pay the bills. They’re going to great lengths to help Junior get a job.

According to Adecco, nearly a third of parents are helping their kids find work, and nearly one in ten are taking them to job interviews.

But that’s not all.

Three percent of recent college grads say their parents have actually sat in with them during interviews, and one percent claim Mom or Dad wrote their thank you notes afterwards.

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A statement posted on the Occupy London website on Tuesday said that there would be a “teach-in” at 1 p.m. on Saturday at St Paul’s, “organised by Tent City University, the educational arm of Occupy London. It is aiming at promoting informed political action and exploring viable economic alternatives before we pay a visit to City institutions that caused and continue to profit by the [financial] crisis.”

It said that the global day of action would involve “citizens using peaceful, creative ways to deliver their own messages to the financial and corporate élite of the City”. The protesters would “continue to exercise our right to peacefully assemble in public spaces”.

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In the American mind, renting has long symbolized striving””striving, that is, well short of achieving. But as we climb our way out of the Great Recession, it seems something has changed. Americans are getting over the idea of owning the American dream; increasingly, they’re OK with renting it. Homeownership is on the decline, and home rentership is on the rise. But the trend isn’t limited to the housing market. Across the board””for goods ranging from cars to books to clothes””Americans are increasingly acclimating to the idea of giving up the stability of being an owner for the flexibility of being a renter. This may sound like a decline in living standards. But the new realities of our increasingly mobile economy make it more likely that this transition from an Ownership Society to what might be called a Rentership Society, far from being a drag, will unleash a wave of economic efficiency

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Friday’s disappointing jobs report will…worsen Washington’s highly polarised politics. Already, initial reaction from there suggest that, rather than act as a catalyst to bring the political class together to address a persistent national problem, the numbers are fueling conflicting political narratives and greater polarisation ”“ thereby reducing further the probability of any timely convergence towards the type of common analysis and common vision that are needed.

With virtually all government entities essentially paralysed by political gridlock, the Federal Reserve will soon confront yet another lose-lose policy dilemma. Does it renew its unconventional activism using inevitably blunt tools that involve a growing set of collateral damage and intended consequences; or does it stick to the sidelines and watch the economy weaken further in the summer?

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The nation’s employers are creating jobs at less than half the pace they were when this year began, according to a government report released Friday.

The addition of just 115,000 jobs in April was disappointing, but economists urged no panic just yet. Maybe the unusually warm winter had encouraged companies to do their spring hiring a little early, they offered in one of several theories. Maybe high gas prices, now falling, temporarily discouraged job growth. Better yet, maybe this latest report understates how many jobs were added, since the initial estimates for earlier months have been revised upward.

But no matter which hopeful explanation you choose, America’s 13.7 million jobless workers still look pretty discouraged.

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ZENIT spoke with Father Tarcisio Giuseppe Stramare of the Congregation of Oblates of Saint Joseph, director of the Josephite Movement, about Tuesday’s feast of St. Joseph the Worker….

ZENIT: What does “Gospel of work” mean?

Father Stramare: “Gospel” is the Good News that refers to Jesus, the Savior of humanity. Well, despite the fact that in general we see Jesus as someone who teaches and does miracles, he was so identified with work that in his time he was regarded as “the son of the carpenter,” namely, an artisan himself. Among many possible activities, the Wisdom of God chose for Jesus manual work, entrusted the education of his Son not to the school of the learned but to a humble artisan, namely, St. Joseph.

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The Rt Rev Michael Nazir Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester, has written to the European Court of Human Rights in support of Christians who claim they suffered discrimination at work when they were banned from displaying the symbol.

He has been granted the status of an “intervener”, meaning the Strasbourg court will take account of his 11-page submission when it hears the case in September.

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The economy lost steam in the first quarter, as onetime engines of growth sputtered and robust consumer spending was unable to propel the recovery on its own.

Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of all goods and services produced in the economy, grew at an annualized rate of 2.2% in the first quarter, down from 3% at the end of 2011, the Commerce Department said Friday. The deceleration reflected sharp cutbacks in government spending and weaker business investment and came despite an unusually warm winter, which many economists said likely provided a mild economic boost.

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The UK is back in recession after a surprise 0.2% contraction in the economy in the first quarter of the year, official figures revealed today.

The decline in gross domestic product (GDP) was driven by the biggest fall in construction output for three years, while the manufacturing sector failed to return to growth, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.

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If Spain’s crisis deepens Europe’s recession, it could tip the entire world economy into a stubborn slump. The ramifications would be enormous, including: reduced odds of Barack Obama’s reelection, assuming a weaker U.S. recovery; less political cohesion and more social unrest in Europe (even now, the European Union’s unemployment rate is 10.2 percent); and growing pressures in many countries for economic nationalism and protectionism.

Spain is suffering a hangover from what economist Desmond Lachman of the American Enterprise Institute calls “the mother of all housing booms.”

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