According to preliminary reports, roughly 90,000 jobs were added to the national economy during the month of July. If that sounds good to you, it is worth noting that if the economy added 90,000 jobs every month, the national unemployment rate would never rise above its current level of a whopping 9.2%. Many economists estimate that when we factor in people whose unemployment benefits have run out, or who simply have given up looking for work because they can't seem to get hired when they do try, the number is closer to 15%. After we include the number of people who are what we would call "under-employed"-those who are working but don't make enough to meet their basic needs, close to 24% of the people of our country are under-worked, under-paid, and ill-provided. We aren't quite to Depression-era numbers yet, but we are frighteningly close to that kind of scenario.
In Jefferson County (where this writer lives), the official unemployment rate hovers between 11 and 12%, and it has hovered between those two numbers for the last two years. Again, if we factoring the "unofficial" unemployed and the under-employed, the number is going to be quite a bit higher. Many of our rural East Tennessee counties are aching for the development that isn't there, and the jobs that citizens used to have-even just a few short years ago. Even Wall Street seems to notice that things aren't getting any better, as Thursday's Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged almost 513 points on the day, in what one observer told The Wall Street Journal was "an absolute bloodbath." A world debt crisis-including continued fears about our own national debt-was one of the factors in yesterday's market nosedive, along with the worsening health of the general economy. One retiree told The Journal that in yesterday's trading his retirement was "going to Hell." As a so-called double-dip recession comes closer to reality, the President, who is no longer able to blame his predecessor for his inability to deal with the national debt or inspire confidence in our currency, has now taken to blaming Congress-in spite of the reality that his own party still controls 2/3rds of the governing apparatus.
Tennesseans are unimpressed and hurting, and Washington just wants to raise the debt ceiling and spend more money. We don't need more of the federal government's money, but we do need government to adopt policies that encourage businesses to develop. Without those kinds of policies, the jobs situation in many East Tennessee counties is unlikely to improve in the near future.
Comments