The unemployment report yesterday shows some job gains, but the overall rate of unemployment remains unchanged from the month before at 8.3 percent, and jobs recovered have retraced only a small portion of the territory lost.
In every other jobs recession since the Second World War jobs recovered to the starting point in every case but one within 2.7 years. Bush's relatively mild job recession took 3.9 years to fully recover.
We are 4.1 years out and job losses are still at the severe depths last reached in the recessions of 1948 and 1957, as shown here.
America once knew how to bounce back quickly.
Not anymore.
