This is an extremely worrisome situation. It means that long-term unemployment isn'tjust a temporary ailment that will heal itself as the economy keeps rebounding. It has left permanent scars. The U.S. economy will never be as productive as it could have been had we figured out how to get people back to work more quickly. And those scars are still getting deeper.
The economists' argument goes like this: There are now millions of Americans who lost their jobs in the recession, often through no fault of their own, and they've now been out of work for years. Those workers have seen their skills atrophy, their networks fade, and many of them have dropped out of the workforce entirely, discouraged by their inability to find work. That, in turn, has weakened the total potential of the U.S. economy.
This is an extremely worrisome situation. It means that long-term unemployment isn'tjust a temporary ailment that will heal itself as the economy keeps rebounding. It has left permanent scars. The U.S. economy will never be as productive as it could have been had we figured out how to get people back to work more quickly. And those scars are still getting deeper.
The economists' argument goes like this: There are now millions of Americans who lost their jobs in the recession, often through no fault of their own, and they've now been out of work for years. Those workers have seen their skills atrophy, their networks fade, and many of them have dropped out of the workforce entirely, discouraged by their inability to find work. That, in