Layoffs Prove the Belt Can Get Tighter

What's a good pictogram for the employment situation, I asked myself. Photo courtesy The SunBreak Flickr Pool shootist Slightlynorth.

I just heard via Facebook (oh, the cold blade of irony) that Classmates.com has "graduated" another round of employees, and TechFlash has the story on Microsoft's 800 layoffs, 200 from the Seattle area.

Jon Talton's timely "Sound Economy" post includes the warning: "More importantly, the holiday layoff season--when companies clear their year-end books and start serious job cutting--is only beginning. Talton observes that while we "only" lost 200,000 jobs nationwide last month, we really needed 125,000 new jobs, net, to keep up with new entrants to the workforce.

So far, as the Seattle Bubble will graph out for you, the stimulus has worked far better for financial giants and stock market profits than for job creation. Now, you have heard that employment is a "lagging indicator," but that doesn't mean it's allowed to lag to infinity--from Talton: "Rutgers economists say it could be 2017 before we recover the lost jobs."

The Tim claims (yes, there's a graph), unemployment is now one percent higher than that predicted by administration economists without any stimulus. This has to be of some consternation in the White House, as historically, high unemployment results in presidential unemployment.