Alone among the world’s economic powers, the United States is suffering through a deep jobs slump that can’t be explained by the rest of the economy’s performance.

The gross domestic product here ”” the total value of all goods and services ”” has recovered from the recession better than in Britain, Germany, Japan or Russia. Yet a greatly shrunken group of American workers, working harder and more efficiently, is producing these goods and services.

The unemployment rate is higher in this country than in Britain or Russia and much higher than in Germany or Japan, according to a study of worldwide job markets that Gallup will release on Wednesday. The American jobless rate is also higher than China’s, Gallup found. The European countries with worse unemployment than the United States tend to be those still mired in crisis, like Greece, Ireland and Spain.

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Not a single Canadian bank failed during the Great Depression, and not a single one failed during the recent U.S. crisis now dubbed the Great Recession. Fewer than 1 percent of all Canadian mortgages are in arrears.

That’s notable given that the recent U.S. economic turmoil was triggered by a meltdown in mortgage finance, forcing an unprecedented government rescue of Wall Street investment banks and the collapse of more than 300 smaller banks as the housing sector went bust.

How’d Canada avoid all that?

“This sounds very simple, but one of our CEOs has said we are in the business of making loans to people who will pay them back,” said Terry Campbell, vice president of policy for the Canadian Bankers Association in Ottawa.

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As our economic conditions continue to deteriorate, mentally disturbed people like Jared Loughner are the first to breakdown and lose it, but there will inevitably be many to follow. This tragedy is not an isolated incident. In just the past few days there have been two more incidents. A lobbyist, who was the wife of a White House adviser, was found dead in a burning car. A man upset over his Social Security benefits threatened to set fire to Senator Michael Bennet’s office and shoot his staff. There have been dozens of similar incidents over the past two years. From John Bedell, the man who opened fire on the Pentagon, to Joe Stack, the man who had a tax dispute and flew his plan into the Austin, Texas IRS building, an increasing number of Americans are beginning to resort to violence as a last desperate act of vengeance.

We can dismiss and write off all of this as just crazy people doing crazy things and go back to living with our heads in the sand, business as usual, or we can begin the urgent task of fixing a society that is severely out of balance.

The choice is ours.

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I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

“Industrial relations” are back at the heart of politics””not as an old-fashioned clash between capital and labour, fought out so brutally in the Thatcherite 1980s, but as one between taxpayers and what William Cobbett, one of the great British liberals, used to refer to as “tax eaters”. People in the private sector are only just beginning to understand how much of a banquet public-sector unions have been having at everybody else’s expense…. In many rich countries wages are on average higher in the state sector, pensions hugely better and jobs far more secure. Even if many individual state workers do magnificent jobs, their unions have blocked reform at every turn. In both America and Europe it is almost as hard to reward an outstanding teacher as it is to sack a useless one.

While union membership has collapsed in the private sector over the past 30 years (from 44% of the workforce to 15% in Britain and from 33% to 15% in America), it has remained buoyant in the public sector. In Britain over half the workers are unionised. In America the figure is now 36% (compared with just 11% in 1960). In much of continental Europe most civil servants belong to unions, albeit ones that straddle the private sector as well. And in public services union power is magnified not just by strikers’ ability to shut down monopolies that everyone needs without seeing their employer go bust, but also by their political clout over those employers.

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Left unsaid [by the President], however, was the fact that job growth was not enough to absorb people entering the work force in the United States, much less to shrink the unemployment rolls.

R. Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia University’s business school and former chairman of the council of economic advisers for President Bush, remains a guarded optimist. He sees signs of the economy gaining speed.

“We could run as high as 200,000 per month this year, but keep in mind that might only bring the unemployment rate down to 9 percent,” Mr. Hubbard said. “That does very little for the person who is long-term unemployed.”

The so-called real unemployment rate, which includes those workers who are discouraged or have given up looking for work, stands at 16.7 percent.

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Unemployment rates rose in more than two-thirds of the nation’s largest metro areas in November, a sharp reversal from the previous month and the most since June.

The Labor Department said Tuesday that unemployment rates rose in 258 of the 372 largest cities, fell in 88 and remained the same in 26. That’s worse than the previous month, when rates fell in 200 areas and rose in 108.

The economy is strengthening, but employers have been reluctant to create jobs. Hiring will pick up in 2011, but not enough to significantly lower the unemployment rate, economists forecast.

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Even the lucky ones are not so lucky, it seems.

A new study of American workers displaced by the recession sheds light on the sacrifices a large number have made to find work. Many, it turns out, had to switch careers and significantly reduce their living standards.

“In many cases, these people are not very happy,” said Cliff Zukin, professor of public policy and political science at Rutgers University and one of the authors of the study. “They’re the winners who got new jobs, but they’re not really what they want, and not where they want to be.”

The study, conducted by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers, was based on a survey of Americans around the country who were unemployed as of August 2009 and re-interviewed about their job status twice over the next 15 months.

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From my perspective, homes are still overvalued not just because of these long-term price trends, but from a sober analysis of the current economy. The country is overly indebted, savings-depleted and underemployed. Without government guarantees no private lenders would be active in the mortgage market, and without ridiculously low interest rates from the Federal Reserve any available credit would cost home buyers much more. These are not conditions that inspire confidence for a recovery in prices.

In trying to maintain artificial prices, government policies are keeping new buyers from entering the market, exposing taxpayers to untold trillions in liabilities and delaying a real recovery. We should recognize this reality and not pin our hopes on a return to price normalcy that never was that normal to begin with.

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Of the myriad ways the Great Recession has altered the country’s social fabric, the surge in households like the Maggis’, where relatives and friends have moved in together as a last resort, is one of the most concrete, yet underexplored, demographic shifts.

Census Bureau data released in September showed that the number of multifamily households jumped 11.7 percent from 2008 to 2010, reaching 15.5 million, or 13.2 percent of all households. It is the highest proportion since at least 1968, accounting for 54 million people.

Even that figure, however, is undoubtedly an undercount of the phenomenon social service providers call “doubling up,” which has ballooned in the recession and anemic recovery. The census’ multifamily household figures, for example, do not include such situations as when a single brother and a single sister move in together, or when a childless adult goes to live with his or her parents.

For many, the arrangements represent their last best option, the only way to stave off entering a homeless shelter or sleeping in their cars. In fact, nearly half of the people in shelters in 2009 who had not previously been homeless had been staying with family members or friends, according to a recent report, making clear that the arrangements are frequently a final way station on the way to homelessness.

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A study by Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management calculates the combined underfunding of pensions in all municipalities at $574 billion. States have an estimated $3.3 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities.

Nunes says 10 states will exhaust their pension money by 2020, and all but eight states will by 2030.

States’ troubles are becoming bigger. Hitherto, local governments have acquired infusions of funds from federal budget earmarks, which are now forbidden. Furthermore, states are suffering “ARRA hangover” – withdrawal from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aka the 2009 stimulus.

There are legal provisions for municipalities to declare bankruptcy. Some have done so. As many as 200 are expected to default on debt next year. There are, however, no bankruptcy provisions for states.

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Cities across the nation are raising property taxes, largely citing rising pension and health-care costs for their employees and retirees.

In Pennsylvania, the township of Upper Moreland is bumping up property taxes for residents by 13.6% in 2011. Next door the city of Philadelphia this year increased the tax 9.9%. In New York, Saratoga Springs will collect 4.4% more in property taxes in 2011; Troy will increase taxes by 1.9%.

Property-tax increases aren’t unusual, in part because the taxes are among the main sources of local revenue. But officials say more and larger increases are taking hold. “This year we have seen a dramatic increase in our cities and towns having to increase property taxes” for pensions and other expenses, said Jack Garner, executive director of the Pennsylvania League of Cities and Municipalities.

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Katie Tucker moved into her own apartment this week, the first real home her 1-year-old baby has ever known.

She had been living with family members and friends for more than a year, but a new Charleston Housing Authority program made a permanent place to live possible, just in time for Christmas.

A series of misfortunes and some personal struggles knocked down Tucker financially, and she and her baby Sydney were having a hard time getting up.

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Eighteen months after the recession officially ended, the government’s latest measures to bolster the economy have led many forecasters and policy makers to express new optimism that the recovery will gain substantial momentum in 2011.

Economists in universities and on Wall Street have raised their growth projections for next year. Retail sales, industrial production and factory orders are on the upswing, and new claims for unemployment benefits are trending downward.

Despite persistently high unemployment, consumer confidence is improving. Large corporations are reporting healthy profits, and the Dow Jones industrial average reached a two-year high this week.

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As the economy gradually recovers, some big U.S. companies are cranking up their recruiting and advertising thousands of job openings, ranging from retail clerks and nurses to bank tellers and experts in cloud computing.

Many of the new jobs are in retailing, accounting, consulting, health care, telecommunications and defense-related industries, according to data collected for The Wall Street Journal by Indeed Inc., which runs one the largest employment websites. It said the number of U.S. job postings on the Internet rose to 4.7 million on Dec. 1, up from 2.7 million a year earlier. The company daily collects listings from corporate and job-posting websites, removing duplicates.

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Last summer, Steve Reinemund, got a surprise phone call from the CEO of Coca Cola thanking him for an enormous favor. But Reinemund, at the time the CEO of Pepsi Co., had no idea what that favor had been.

It turns out an unsuspecting Pepsi Co. administrative assistant received a package in the mail containing confidential Coca Cola documents. In keeping with Pepsi’s commitment to high ethical standards, the employee notified the appropriate company manger and the entire contents were immediately returned to Coke’s headquarters in Atlanta. Only two Pepsi employees were directly involved, and they both knew what they had to do right away. No executives at Pepsi so much as glanced at the secrets contained within that envelope.

Steve Reinemund recounted this story to a rapt group of 250 in February as an example of the type of integrity he believes is ”“”within the very DNA”of Pepsi’s corporate character.

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– Employment figures, economic indicators, stock prices. Bah, humbug! Read some letters to Santa if you want to understand the Recession That Will Not Die….

“Letters to Santa? From grown-ups?” I asked.

Nearly 300 letters, written in neat print or loopy cursive script, described jobs lost and hungry children, addressed by adults to a man in a red suit who is apparently their last hope.

“I’m a single mom living in the D.C. General shelter with my kids,” one letter began. It ended with a request for not toys or bikes but clothes. Instead of model numbers and prices, she included her children’s shoe, underwear and clothing sizes.

“I want them to know there is hope,” she wrote.

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Also, I caught an NPR story during the week on this same theme. Read or listen to it all also.

The recession has finally caught up with churches.

After two years of treading water, more Protestant congregations have seen their Sunday collections drop this year.

Pastors blame high unemployment and a drop in per-capita giving by members. To make ends meet, churches have laid off staff and frozen salaries, put off major capital projects and cut back on programs. At the same time, more of their congregation members and neighbors are asking for help with basic needs such as paying the rent and buying groceries.

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It is surprising that over the past several years very little has been said in the popular media about the fact that America is slowly (but surely) transforming from a full-time to part-time employed society. And while much has been said about the temporary and now past impact of census hiring, and government jobs on the workforce, there are still few mentions in mainstream media that since the depression started in December 2007, America has lost 10.5 million full time jobs, offset by a 2.8 million increase in part time jobs.

Read it all and take note of the two charts.

Still in debt [after his first start-up company failed], Mr. Gerber considered his career options. His mother kept encouraging him to get a “real” job, the kind that comes with an office and a boss. But, using the last $700 in his bank account, he decided to start another company instead.

With the new company, called Sizzle It, Mr. Gerber vowed to find a niche, reduce overhead and generally be more frugal. The company, which specializes in short promotional videos, was profitable the first year, he says.

Mr. Gerber, now 27, isn’t a millionaire, but he’s paid off his loans and doesn’t have to live with his parents (he rents an apartment in Hoboken, N.J.). And he thinks his experience can help other young people who face a daunting unemployment rate.

In October, Mr. Gerber started the Young Entrepreneur Council “to create a shift from a résumé-driven society to one where people create their own jobs,” he says. “The jobs are going to come from the entrepreneurial level.”

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The financial crisis has been hard on just about everyone. But for older folks, the pain is proving particularly deep and lasting ”” a problem that could put a drag on the economy for many years to come.

People approaching retirement age are suffering on all fronts. Even with the Dow above 11,000, their stock holdings are worth less than they were back in 2006. Fixed-income investments hardly provide any income. Home prices remain depressed.

As a result, more older people are trying to make up lost ground by staying at work longer or rejoining the labor force ”“ precisely at a time when finding a job is exceedingly difficult.

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From here:

From officiating at a wedding ceremony to eulogizing at a funeral, it’s clear that the job of a clergy member is complex but crucial. Whether you’re a priest, minister, vicar, rabbi, or bishop, it’s typically your job to provide religious and spiritual guidance to members of your congregation. While you will most likely rely on the authority of a particular religious text””the Bible, the Koran, or the Torah, for example””you will encounter challenging spiritual questions and earthly events that require your own interpretation of those texts and rely on your own knowledge, understanding, and faith experiences. Much of your work can be administrative””managing the day-to-day operations and staff of a religious center or place of worship””and very time consuming. It can also be highly social, whether you’re visiting congregation members in the hospital, attending a community event, or counseling a couple on the brink of divorce. It will be your responsibility to grow your congregation, find reliable lay leaders to run workshops or handle finances, and even oversee the repair of old lighting fixtures and damaged organ pipes. Keep in mind, too, that not all clerics have congregations, but may serve in other capacities….

There would seem to be no shortage of clergy in this country. There were about 670,000 jobs held by clergy in 2008, and the Labor Department expects that number to climb by 13 percent over the next decade or so. Note that opportunities are often the most numerous in smaller congregations, although pay tends to be lower.

Read the rest and check out the whole list at the link.

[Scott] Pelley: How would you rate the likelihood of dipping into recession again?

[Ben] Bernanke: It doesn’t seem likely that we’ll have a double dip recession. And that’s because, among other things, some of the most cyclical parts of the economy, like housing, for example, are already very weak. And they can’t get much weaker. And so another decline is relatively unlikely. Now, that being said, I think a very high unemployment rate for a protracted period of time, which makes consumers, households less confident, more worried about the future, I think that’s the primary source of risk that we might have another slowdown in the economy.

Pelley: You seem to be saying that the recovery that we’re experiencing now is not self-sustaining.

Bernanke: It may not be. It’s very close to the border. It takes about two and a half percent growth just to keep unemployment stable. And that’s about what we’re getting. We’re not very far from the level where the economy is not self-sustaining.

The debate on Capitol Hill this week is over whether to extend the Bush tax cuts, which would likely increase the budget deficit.

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Although baptised a Presbyterian, from his early twenties MacIntyre abandoned religion for a quarter of a century. He appears to have shared for a time AJ Ayer’s assertion that the only significant propositions are those that can be empirically or scientifically verified. MacIntyre’s conversion to Catholicism in his fifties, he tells me, occurred as a result of being convinced of Thomism while attempting to disabuse his students of its authenticity. Aquinas combined Aristotle’s account of a universe knowable through observation with Christian philosophy, arguing that such a world still required God’s existence as its sustaining creator. An Aristotelian-Thomistic view of society and the world, as set out in After Virtue, offered the best philosophical underpinning for human flourishing, and the only alternative to the fragmentation of modern moral philosophy.

MacIntyre argues that those committed to the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of the common good must begin again. This involves “capturing the double aspect of the globalising economy and its financial sector, so that we understand it both as an engine of growth and as such a source of benefits, but equally as a perpetrator of great harms and continuing injustices.” Apologists for globalisation, he argues, treat it as a source of benefits, and only accidentally and incidentally a source of harms. Hence, the view that “to be for or against globalisation is in some ways like being for or against the weather.”

MacIntyre maintains, however, that the system must be understood in terms of its vices””in particular debt. The owners and managers of capital always want to keep wages and other costs as low as possible. “But, insofar as they succeed, they create a recurrent problem for themselves. For workers are also consumers and capitalism requires consumers with the purchasing power to buy its products. So there is tension between the need to keep wages low and the need to keep consumption high.” Capitalism has solved this dilemma, MacIntyre says, by bringing future consumption into the present by dramatic extensions of credit.

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Today’s awful job figures crossed the wires just as I was mulling a post on how the Fed’s policy of pumping money into the bond market””a.k.a. quantitative easing””was showing signs of working. Over the past couple of weeks, a number of indicators have suggested that the economy is picking up a bit: purchases of cars and trucks have jumped significantly, retailers posted solid sales over Thanksgiving, and consumer confidence has rebounded. Even the bombed-out housing market””a direct beneficiary of Fed policy, which is largely aimed at keeping down mortgage rates””has shown signs of life: the number of home sales jumped last month. The U.S. economics team at Goldman Sachs, which has been one of the most pessimistic on Wall Street, just upgraded its forecast for G.D.P. growth in 2011 from 2.0 per cent to 2.7 per cent. That’s still not a great figure””after a recession, economies often expand at a rate of four or five per cent for a couple of years””but the upgrade was a signal that worries of a “double dip” recession were receding.

Then came this morning’s shocker: the economy created just 39,000 jobs in November, compared to 172,000 in October, and the unemployment rate jumped from 9.6 per cent to 9.8 per cent. Health care and temporary help services were the only sectors reporting significant new hiring. Most other sectors reported flat payrolls or reductions. The sectors cutting jobs included retailing and finance, which had appeared to be doing relatively well. What is going on? In ascending order of frightfulness, here are four possibilities….

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A bold plan to slash the U.S. budget deficit fell short Friday of winning support needed from a presidential commission to trigger congressional action, but it was expected to help shape future budget debates.

The plan found more backing than many anticipated, from Democrats and Republicans, and parts of it could be used in President Barack Obama’s next budget, due in February, as well as in congressional proposals to follow.

A formal commission vote did not occur, but 11 members said they supported the plan and seven said they did not. It needed 14 votes to be sent to Congress for legislative action.

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Employers added fewer jobs than forecast in November and the unemployment rate unexpectedly increased, vindicating the Federal Reserve’s decision to pump more money into the economy to spur growth.

Payrolls increased 39,000, less than the most pessimistic projection of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News, after a revised 172,000 increase the prior month, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. The jobless rate rose to 9.8 percent, the highest since April, while hours worked and earnings stagnated.

More jobs are needed to sustain the holiday-season gains in consumer spending, the biggest part of the economy, into the new year. Payrolls aren’t growing fast enough to lower the jobless rate, one reason why Fed policy makers announced a new round of monetary stimulus.

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The longer people stay out of work, the more trouble they have finding new work.

That is a fact of life that much of Europe, with its underclass of permanently idle workers, knows all too well. But it is a lesson that the United States seems to be just learning.

This country has some of the highest levels of long-term unemployment ”” out of work longer than six months ”” it has ever recorded. Meanwhile, job growth has been, and looks to remain, disappointingly slow, indicating that those out of work for a while are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Even if the government report on Friday shows the expected improvement in hiring by business, it will not be enough to make a real dent in those totals.

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Delta Air Lines is having what might possibly be the most-popular job search in a long time. More than 100,000 people have applied for just 1,000 openings as flight attendants.

Part of the reason behind the huge turnout might be the nation’s persistently high unemployment rate, but the airline says that a lot of people just want to fly.

“I realized that I didn’t want to be in an office 9 to 5,” said Jordan Leonard, a flight attendant who has worked 20 years for Delta and now also helps with hiring. “I’m about to go all around the world; Europe, South America, Asia. You name it, I’ve probably been there.”

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The Auckland service will be led by Anglican Church and Catholic Church leaders and will feature representatives from other faiths and the wider Auckland community.

“At times like this, it is important for the community to come together to remember those who have been lost and support those left behind,” says Anglican Bishop of Auckland, the Right Reverend Ross Bay.

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Some 12,000 South Carolinians will wake this morning to find the safety net they depend on to pay mortgages, buy food and heat their homes has been pulled out from under them.

The lame-duck Congress on Tuesday did not extend benefits to the long-term unemployed beyond the two years’ worth of aid already provided by the state and federal government.

For those at the deadline, the clock has run out.

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