The Bureau of Labor Statistics released their June employment report today, and almost all of the findings recorded in the report were awful. Unemployment is up to 9.2 percent, more than 0.4 percent higher than it was two months ago. This puts the total number of unemployed people — a term which only includes those who are actually looking for jobs — at 14.1 million. An additional 8.6 million people are underemployed, working part-time because no full-time work can be found.
The reaction to the report — at least in the mainstream outlets — has been predictably narrow. Article after article has been published speculating on the impact it will have for a presidential election which takes place 17 months from now. This speculation, in addition to being totally without merit as Nate Silver explains over at Five Thirty Eight, demonstrates the completely misguided way that political commentators typically handle these kinds of reports. Either out of laziness or a lack of creativity, the slant taken on news of this sort almost always involves discussing its relevance to some forthcoming election, even ones so far out as to make the commentary border on the absurd.
More substantive analysis would ask the questions that really matter. What does long-term unemployment actually mean for those who are made to endure it? What impact does it have on a family when one or both of the parents cannot find a job? In short, how much suffering does this massive amount of unemployment and underemployment impart on the people in the country?
About the only reprieve from the endless horse race analysis — analysis that crops up even when a horse race is not present — is Ezra Klein’s blog over at the Washington Post. Filling in for him today, Dylan Matthews highlights the significance of unemployment, pointing to two studies which show the permanent negative effects of unemployment on a person’s long-term income and health. It suffices to say that unemployment’s actual significance lies not in its effects on polling, but in the ways it wreaks havoc on the country.
In addition to the long-term health and income losses it imposes on individuals, large-scale unemployment and underemployment results in an enormous waste of productive potential. Imagine what 14.1 million people working every day could produce, and what 8.6 million people working full-time instead of part-time could produce. With that labor, we could be building high-speed rail lines, wind turbines, and repairing existing infrastructure. That of course is just to name a few possibilities. However, instead of utilizing this massive labor force, the present economy is preventing it from being tapped at all, at least in the private sector.
With unemployment increasing, the highest levels of income and wealth inequality on record, and decades of total wage stagnation for the bottom 90 percent, it becomes harder and harder to take seriously efforts to preserve American-style capitalism. When large swaths of the population are forced to remain idle because the private sector cannot conceive of ways to make them profitable, we need some other way to put them to work. Perhaps a public jobs program like the Works Project Administration — an approach Paul Krugman has endorsed — is something that should be seriously considered.
Whether it is a new WPA or something else, inaction on the issue of unemployment should be totally out of the question. But instead of working overtime to address the unemployment problem, the political apparatus of this country has been hooked into a months long bit of political theatre centering around the debt ceiling. Once that theatre concludes in early August, even worse theatre will start to kick into high gear surrounding the upcoming presidential election.
These misplaced political priorities are fairly normal for the circus that is the federal government, and in some cases the theatre they generate is harmless and amusing. The lack of action on unemployment is not such a case. In a more level-headed political atmosphere, Obama and the national Republicans would be completely embarrassed about the productive potential high unemployment is leaving untapped. But in this political climate, almost no one seems to care.