Years of Trouble

Some interesting statistics over the course of these last 23 months:

• 1 in 6 (17%) of Americans are unemployed
• 25 million unemployed
• recession wiped out 15% of manufacturing workforce
• 2 million of those jobs will never come back

These are hard stats to look at now that we are several years into this deep recession. This great recession has annihilated a decade's worth of job expansion. We just created less than half a million jobs. In the previous four decades the economy created 18 million jobs.

Now there might be reasoning that the job market was just slowing down, but that seems like a large jump from nearly 5 million jobs a decade to less than 1/2 jobs per decade.