Mort Zuckerman on the jobs disaster

I think Mort has just about the biggest case of buyer's remorse that I've ever seen.  Read the whole thing here.

The history of job numbers gives no cause for optimism. Private-sector jobs increased about 3.5 percent a year from the 1950s through the 1970s, 2.4 percent in the 1980s and 1990s, and less than 1 percent annually during the last decade. From 1985 to 2008, U.S. unemployment averaged 5.6 percent, compared with about 7.5 percent for the six largest economies in the European Union. Today, many of those countries now have lower unemployment rates than ours. In the 10 years after December 1989, the U.S. economy gained 21.7 million jobs. By contrast, from December 1999 through December 2009, we lost 944,000 jobs. Even without counting the end-of-decade recession, and comparing the first eight years of the 1990s to the same span in the 2000s, payroll employment rose by less than half—under 7.5 million jobs compared with nearly 16 million.

When you get lost, the first thing to do is to stop blundering around blindly.  Be still.  And then figure out how to retrace the steps that got you into this mess to begin with.

On November 2nd at least the blind, stupid blundering will stop.