It seems like politicians for months have been throwing around numbers in the billions and saying that unless the government acts right now everything will get worse. What is going on?

The economic system was hit was a flurry of crises at roughly the same time, and there isn’t a single solution to all of the problems, even though they are connected.

What is the housing crisis?

Both political parties have supported the idea that individuals should own their own homes. But in pursuing that goal, some financial institutions lent money to people who could not afford the long-term commitment, which often included rising interest rates after an initial period of low payments. Critics complain that a variety of financing vehicles snared people into impossible situations, especially as prices of homes fell and the monthly mortgage payment rose.

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Back in the rest of the world, companies don’t need to cut benefits if workers do it for them. You can hear it when you talk to working moms, all the old theme songs played at twice the volume. Do I dare ask for flextime? Miss the meeting for the doctor’s appointment? Governor Palin made it sound as if it was all in a day’s work when she talked about juggling BlackBerry and breast pump. But as conditions get worse and 75,000 jobs turn to powder in a day, the strain on survivors can only grow. It doesn’t help that on TV every Tom, Dick and Suze keeps telling us that this is a good time to “dig in and show your boss how good you are. Take on extra projects. Shine at whatever you do.”

A job, like a marriage, has its honeymoon phase, its strengths and strains and things that make us crazy. But now as all our emotions are rewired, we are grateful for what we once just assumed and frightened of things we once ignored. It would be lovely to rely on the wisdom and benevolence of bosses everywhere to realize that when people are frightened about losing their job, loyalty, productivity and morale all plunge. If employers are tempted to exploit such fears, squeeze more work out of fewer people, roll back benefits because there are 100 people lined up for every job, they may find that as in so many things, the short-term fix is long-term dumb.

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As legislative leaders Tuesday moved toward a deal that could wipe out the state’s $42-billion deficit with temporary tax hikes on retail sales, cars, gasoline and millionaires, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger threatened to lay off as many as 10,000 state employees if a new budget is not passed this week.

State workers will begin receiving pink slips Friday, absent a fiscal agreement by then, administration officials said. The layoff process generally takes about six months for state employees due to union rules and other considerations, such as bureaucratic procedures the state must follow. The move would save the state $750 million annually if the jobs are eliminated by July 1, according to Aaron McLear, Schwarzenegger’s spokesman.

“This is not a [negotiating] tactic,” McLear said. “This is simply out of necessity. The state is running out of money. The governor has very few options at his disposal that he can unilaterally use to cut back on state spending.”

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The problem with this picture is not Glenn Goss. By all accounts he was a good cop. The problem is that there are millions of Glenn Gosses from Highland Beach to Honolulu. So many that they pose a vast, debilitating burden to state and local finances.

They’re creating a nasty social problem as well. America, in case you hadn’t noticed, is dividing into two nations. The 22.5-million-strong public sector (that includes retirees) is growing ever larger, and enjoying ever greater wages and benefits often guaranteed by state constitutions.

In private-sector America your job, assuming you still have one, hangs on the fate of the economy. If your employer ever offered a pension for life, like young officer Goss is receiving, odds are it has stopped doing so, or soon will. Those retirement accounts you scrimped and saved to assemble? Unless they are invested in Treasurys, they aren’t doing too well. In private-sector America the math leads to the grim prospect of working longer and living poorer.

In public-sector America things just get better and better. The common presumption is that public servants forgo high wages in exchange for safe jobs and benefits. The reality is they get all three. State and local government workers get paid an average of $25.30 an hour, which is 33% higher than the private sector’s $19, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Throw in pensions and other benefits and the gap widens to 42%.

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Thousands of people in the Washington area and hundreds of thousands more across the country are waiting longer than they should for unemployment benefits at a time when they need the money the most because rising joblessness is overwhelming claims offices, records show.

The problem is compounded by a simultaneous decrease in federal funding, which has reduced staffing at some local government offices. The result is that the District and many states, including Maryland and Virginia, are failing to meet federal guidelines that require timely processing of unemployment claims, appeals and benefit payments, the records show.

It’s likely to get worse. Figures released yesterday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show that Washington area unemployment has hit its highest level since August 1993. The jobless rate climbed to 4.7 percent in December from 3 percent a year earlier and 4.4 percent in November. That’s well below the national average of 7.2 percent but still a burden for claims offices.

Carrie Kenworthy of Manassas has experienced the problem. She was laid off from her $80,000-a-year job as a mortgage loan officer in 2007. Then she tried to file for an extension in unemployment benefits in July. The Virginia Employment Commission denied her claim three times. Her appeals took more than two months because of a state backlog in cases.

Read it all and make sure to take the time to look at the two photographs also.

More than 20m rural migrant workers in China have lost their jobs and returned to their home villages or towns as a result of the global economic crisis, government figures revealed on Monday.

By the start of the Chinese new year festival on January 25, 15.3 per cent of China’s 130m migrant workers had lost their jobs and left coastal manufacturing centres to return home, said officials quoting a survey from the agriculture ministry

The job losses were a direct result of the global economic crisis and its impact on export-oriented manufacturers, said Chen Xiwen, director of the Office of Central Rural Work Leading Group. He warned that the flood of unemployed migrants would pose challenges to social stability in the countryside.

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Water pipes will burst and fires will ravage homes. Which is why Brad Hager thought his job as a damage assessor at an insurance company was secure, even in a nasty recession.

But executives at his small company decided to cut back as a precaution, leaving Hager unemployed and worried about making mortgage payments on the Summerville home where he and his wife, Melissa, are raising two young girls and a teen-age foster son.

The Hagers had prepared to wait out the tough economic times. Brad, a painter who saw business slow last summer, took the job at the insurance firm after intentionally seeking out an industry he thought was recession-proof.

“This is all so surreal. I still don’t believe it,” said Melissa while attending a recent foreclosure prevention seminar in North Charleston. “If it’s happening to us, it’s really bad.”

Read it all from the front page of the local paper.

A nationwide strike Thursday by French public and private sector workers fearful about the global economic crisis shut down rail and subway lines, choked public services and left millions of schoolchildren without their teachers across the country.

In Paris, commuters braved freezing temperatures and biked, walked and even took boats to work. But a 2007 law ensuring minimal transport service meant that some subways, buses and suburban rail lines were operating ”” and they were stuffed full of passengers.

Railway workers led the walkout that the French already are calling “Black Thursday.” Commuters, however, appeared resigned to the year’s first big strike.

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Complaints of religious discrimination in the workplace are on the rise, but civil rights advocates say that may not be such a bad thing.

That’s because a likely reason for a steady rise in reported incidents has nothing to do with intolerant corporate cultures but rather religious minorities who are more aware of their rights and more willing to exercise them.

“Before, somebody might have prayed kind of quietly at work and hoped nobody would stop them and didn’t really want to ask permission,” says Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). “Now they state openly: `Yes, I’d like permission. Is there an open room where I could pray?”‘

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The wave of foreclosures, which began in early 2007, was initially triggered by falling home values and resets on adjustable-rate loans. But lenders and industry analysts say the trend is now being exacerbated by rising unemployment, which has shot up to 9.3% in California.

“The people who are defaulting now are not really people who recklessly got into loans they never could have afforded,” said Evan Wagner, the communications director for IndyMac Federal Bank, a big mortgage lender that, having collapsed last year, is being bought by private investors. “These are people who have lost their jobs or who have had their hours cut back at work.”

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One look at the headlines, and today’s job hunters don’t figure they have a prayer of finding work.

That may be why some are seeking advice from career coaches in unlikely places: local churches and synagogues.

Religious institutions in lower Fairfield County have been organizing networking meetings for job-hunters to discuss leads and strategies. Many of the attendees are not members of the religious institutions. In most cases, they are welcome, and there is no charge.

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Asked about the kind of job he wanted, an applicant at our tax management company stated, “I seek full authority but limited responsibility.”

–Mike Wilkerson in the February 2009 Reader’s Digest, page 53

Giving workers the boot isn’t the only way businesses are trying to reduce costs these days. Broad-based pay cuts, long frowned upon, are being imposed by a growing number of companies big and small.

It is a risky strategy that experts say can sow discord in the workplace. But some employers say they prefer cost-cutting that preserves as many jobs as possible, even if it means more workers will be affected.

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My 28-year-old niece, with whom I am staying (the rate is unbeatable), is similarly and suddenly “consulting” — mostly through the want ads on Mediabistro and Craigslist these days. The magazine for which she’s been a marketing strategist is suffering financial woes and has had to cut several positions, including hers.

“Consulting” and “freelancing” are old euphemisms for a new demographic, the upscale terms for “outta work.” Down on their luck, these newbies to the unemployment lines aren’t living paycheck to paycheck. “We’re living gig to gig,” says my niece.

How many consultants can dine on the dime of a tanking economy? A new poll by Tina Brown’s Daily Beast and Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates confirms that the Sarabeth’s pair and my niece are not isolated anecdotes but are part of a trend no one would have imagined a few years ago. “Gigonomics,” Brown calls it.

The poll, conducted online among 500 employed Americans over 18, found that a third are working as freelancers or in two jobs. Of those who call themselves freelancers, 58 percent previously had a staff position with the company for which they’re now doing “gigs.”

Read the whole piece.

From Gary Dvorchak:

Headline numbers looked more benign, but I just got an update from market strategist Bill King noting that without seasonal adjustment, the job loss was 954,000. Also, the “birth/death model” inexplicably created 72,000 jobs in December, which is ridiculous. So you can make the case we lost a million jobs in December.

Update: From Bloomberg:

“The labor market is clearly not functioning at all,” Wachovia economist John Silvia says of ongoing job losses, underscored by today’s non-farm payrolls data. “This will be a big hit to consumer spending and confidence. It suggests a very long, challenging recession.”

Here’s a tip: Get to the unemployment office before 3 p.m. After that, the doors are locked and nobody gets in.

Tuesday, it didn’t really matter, though. The one-story office building at 3391 Plainfield Ave. NE was crammed with hundreds of jobless people, from the counters to the double-glass doors out into the parking lot.

Just before 3 p.m., you would be the 637th person in line. Soon, another 10 or 20 more people would shove in behind you before the security guard locked the door.

This is the face of unemployment in Michigan.

Painful stuff. Read it all.

The Church of England has published two new prayers to comfort people made redundant, and those remaining in the workplace following a round of redundancies, at the beginning of a year in which the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has predicted that at least 600,000 people could lose their jobs.

The ”˜Prayer on being made redundant’ helps to put into words the anxieties of those who are losing – or who have already lost – their job in the wave of recent redundancies. It includes the verse: “Hear me as I cry out in confusion, help me to think clearly, and calm my soul.”

The ”˜Prayer for those remaining in the workplace’ focuses on the guilt and increased workload associated with redundancy. It asks of God: “In the midst of this uncertainty, help me to keep going: to work to the best of my ability, taking each day at a time.”

Read it all and let us know what you make of the prayers.

A report on Wednesday showed private sector job losses of 693,000 in December, far greater than economists had expected. Small businesses accounted for an unusually large 40 percent of the decline, according to the figures from ADP Employer Services and Macroeconomic Advisers (a pdf of the full report is here).

If a government report on December employment on Friday is as dire as the data from ADP, it may be a sign that another pillar of the economy — small business — is buckling as the recession drags on into a second year.

“Everybody is trying to hang on now,” said William Dunkelberg, chief economist for the National Federation of Independent Business.

“More and more of these firms are in survival mode. They kept thinking consumers will make it, but then December rolls around and sales are still not going anywhere — in fact they’re going down — and finally (small businesses) run out of money,” he said.

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Electronic unemployment filing systems have crashed in at least three states in recent days amid an unprecedented crush of thousands of newly jobless Americans seeking benefits, and other states were adjusting their systems to avoid being next.

About 4.5 million Americans are collecting jobless benefits, a 26-year high, so the Web sites and phone systems now commonly used to file for benefits are being tested like never before.

Even those that are holding up under the strain are in many cases leaving filers on the line for hours, or kissing them off with an “all circuits are busy” message. Agencies have been scrambling to hire hundreds more workers to handle the calls.

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President-elect Barack Obama said that Democrats and Republicans need to act with urgency to address the “great and growing” economic crisis, warning of double-digit unemployment if swift action isn’t taken.

“These are America’s problems, and we must come together as Americans to meet them with the urgency this moment demands,” he said today in his weekly radio address. “If we don’t act swiftly and boldly, we could see a much deeper economic downturn that could lead to double-digit unemployment.”

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Jennifer Barlett sees the cracks everyday. As a supervisor for MedAssist, a third-party recovery company that contracts with Trident Health System, her job is to try to fill the gaps.

She scours Medicaid, Medicare, charities and long-term payment plans to help uninsured people find ways to pay their medical bills.

In one family Barlett is counseling, the wife lost her job, and also the health insurance that covered her and her husband. The couple tried to go it alone, becoming self-employed, but when he fell gravely ill, they had to close the business.

“No health insurance. No money,” Barlett said. They’re waiting to hear from Medicaid and Social Security.

Read it all from the front page of the local paper.

Here’s the vacation no one wants, courtesy of the recession: Forced time off without pay.

Financially struggling universities, factories and even hospitals are requiring employees to take unpaid “furloughs” – temporary layoffs that amount to one-time pay cuts for workers and a cost savings for employers. This year, the number of temporarily laid off workers hit a 17-year high.

“If they do it once, I think it’s easier for them to try to do it again,” said Carrie Swartout, who researches traumatic brain injuries at the University of Maryland Medical Center. Maryland is requiring unpaid time off for 67,000 of its 80,000 employees as it struggles with a budget crisis. The state says the furloughs will save an estimated $34 million during the fiscal year.

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So symbolic for the overall economy.

That’s what Robin Shahan did. The San Ramon, Calif., computer programmer was laid off from Chevron in 1999 and SBC in 2004. In 2005, AT&T let her go when her contract ended. When she was still unemployed months later, Shahan began upgrading her skills. She reviewed a technical book for a friend, which landed her name on the back cover, and read more than 7,000 pages of technical material. She rewrote some of her old applications in the new technologies she’d studied. She posted answers to hundreds of questions on Internet message boards.

“It was like giving myself a pop quiz every day,” says Shahan, who danced around her living room when she was offered a job in March. Shahan was in a position to turn her unemployment into something positive and that helped ease her fears. But the isolation was challenging, she says.

“Prayer helps,” she says. “But if you let your thoughts get the best of you, you can wind yourself up pretty fast. After all, it is like the ultimate rejection, but most of the time it doesn’t have anything to do with you,” she said about a layoff.

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The number of people out of work in South Carolina soared in November to its highest rate in 25 years, and to make matters worse, the state Employment Security Commission says it will run out of money for jobless claims in two weeks unless the state asks for $146 million in federal aid.

The jobless level soared to 8.4 percent, half a percent higher than the revised 7.9 percent of people claiming jobless benefits in October.

“It’s a further worsening of conditions,” said Sam McClary, a labor analyst with the Employment Security Commission. “It was almost across the board. There was a small increase in retail trade (employment), but it was far below what we normally see this time of year.”

Read it all from the front page of the local paper.

Update: There is even more here.

President Bush has grudgingly allowed General Motors and Chrysler to drive away with the last few billion bucks in Treasury’s TARP till, which boasted $350 billion a mere 77 days ago.

How did it all slip away so fast?

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The Federal Reserve entered a new era on Tuesday, setting its benchmark interest rate so low that it will have to reach for new and untested tools in fighting both the recession and downward pressure on consumer prices.

Going further than analysts anticipated, the central bank said it had cut its target for the overnight federal funds rate to a range of zero to 0.25 percent, a record low, bringing the United States to the zero-rate policies that Japan used for six years in its own fight against deflation.

The move to a zero rate, which affects how much banks charge when they lend their reserves to each other, is to some degree symbolic. Though the Fed’s target had previously been 1 percent, demand for interbank lending has been so low that the actual Fed funds rate has hovering just above zero for the past month.

Far more important than the rate itself, the Fed bluntly declared that it was ready to move to a new phase of monetary policy in which it prints vast amounts of money for a wide array of lending programs aimed at financial institutions, businesses and consumers.

In essence, the Fed is embarking on a radically different route to stimulate the faltering economy, and it puts the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, in partnership with the incoming Obama administration as it moves on a parallel track.

This is a high risk tack in terms of the potential for inflation down the road (unless it is properly handled), but it is much needed. The Fed has been badly behind since this whole crisis began and the chairman was telling us that the subprime struggles would stay “isolated” to a small part of the economy. Better late than never–read it all.

President-elect Barack Obama’s team is considering a plan to boost the recession-hit U.S. economy that could be far larger than previous estimates and might reach $1 trillion over two years, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.

Obama aides, who were considering a half-trillion dollar package two weeks ago, now consider $600 billion over two years “a very low-end estimate,” the newspaper said, citing an unidentified person familiar with the matter.

The final size of the stimulus was expected to be significantly higher, possibly between $700 billion and $1 trillion over that period, it said, given the deteriorating state of the U.S. economy.

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In Port Charlotte, Fla., Sharon Byberg has been looking for a job for 15 months, after being laid off by a surveying company where she made $17 an hour making blueprints for architects and builders.

Ms. Byberg has had few responses to her job applications at national retailers, fast-food chains and grocery stores. A local gas station got more than 1,000 applications for two jobs paying about $8 an hour, Ms. Byberg said.

“Jobs are like diamonds,” she said. “You got to know somebody to get one and they’re extremely rare. … Employers can pick and choose who they want.”

Ms. Byberg, 48, said she has $50 in a bank account and faces about $300 in bills for car insurance and a mobile phone. She hasn’t had any income since her unemployment insurance benefits ran out this September, so she and her 15-year-old daughter now live with her retired mother, whose Social Security checks cover essential costs.

She doesn’t plan to buy anything for the holiday. “I don’t see a Christmas,” she said.

—From a front page story in Friday’s Wall Street Journal

As bad as the headline numbers in Friday’s employment report were, they still made the job market look better than it really is.

The unemployment rate reached its highest point since 1993, and overall employment fell by more than a half million jobs. Yet that was just the beginning. Thanks to the vagaries of the way that the government’s best-known jobs statistics are calculated, they have overlooked many workers who have been deeply affected by the current recession.

The number of people out of the labor force ”” meaning that they were neither working nor looking for work and that the government did not consider them unemployed ”” jumped by 637,000 last month, the Labor Department said. The number of part-time workers who said they wanted full-time work ”” all counted as fully employed ”” rose by an additional 621,000.

Take these people into account, and the job market may be in its worst condition since the early 1980s. It is still deteriorating rapidly, too.

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