economic recovery

When employers no longer even want to talk to you:

But just how bad is it for the long-term unemployed? Ghayad ran a follow-up field experiment to find out. In a new working paper, he sent out 4800 fictitious resumes to 600 job openings, with 3600 of them for fake unemployed people. Among those 3600, he varied how long they'd been out of work, how often they'd switched jobs, and whether they had any industry experience. Everything else was kept constant. The mocked-up resumes were all male, all had randomly-selected (and racially ambiguous) names, and all had similar education backgrounds. The question was which of them would get callbacks.

It turns out long-term unemployment is much scarier than you could possibly imagine.

I know this is depressing as hell, but I had to post it. Many on the right favor the meme that long-term unemployed simply aren't trying to get a job, and I'm sure there are some that aren't. But the vast majority are breaking their asses trying to find something, and they don't deserve to be treated the way the NC GOP is treating them. The sadness continues:

US corporations are keeping the money and asking people to work harder and harder from Leslie Boyd's blog, "Letters from the Left."

...corporations are still sitting on their money and workers are still being asked to do the jobs of two or three people and to be grateful they have a job at all.

What’s worst is that wages are falling fastest for the lowest-earning workers — the very people who need wage increases the most.

Over the past week, Sarah Palin encouraged Tea-Party candidates to make energy issues a central part of their campaigns. "There's nothing stopping us from achieving energy independence that a good old national election can't fix," she said.

Palin's full of surprises, but this piece of campaign advice caught me off-guard. After all, a recent poll found that energy is the issue that inspires the most faith in Democratic lawmakers. Since President Obama made clean energy a central part of their campaign in 2008, this poll suggests that this is what the majority of people want. Therefore, Democrats AND Republicans should all be running on clean energy.

And is still working.

The stimulus package, flaws and all, deserves a big heaping of credit. “It prevented things from getting much worse than they otherwise would have been,” Nariman Behravesh, Global Insight’s chief economist, says. “I think everyone would have to acknowledge that’s a good thing.”