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(Keep the faith, trueblue. - promoted by Dean Barker)
It was one year ago this week that my employer, a software firm in Manchester, told me I no longer had a job. Major customers had canceled their pending purchase orders because of the deteriorating economy. My employer could no longer pay my princely salary which was already 25% less than what I was earning thirty months earlier.
In the past twelve months, despite sending out resumes every week and working my contacts, I've landed six interviews. That's counting Target and U-Haul, places that would pay less I'm getting on unemployment.
As the President said on Wednesday night, "The devastation still remains."
This chart is getting a lot of play in the blogosphere:
Look at the X axis in particular. Look how many years it has taken to recover from a gap the height of the current one - just the gap from where the green line drops below the others.
The more I study this chart, the more worried I get.
Senator Shaheen, Kathy suggested that you've been working to get the 60 votes to pass something. Thank you! Because we need a big stimulus bill, bigger than this, and we need it yesterday.
VP Biden stated this weekend that the Stimulus Bill projected creating "up to" 4M jobs. At a cost of nearly $1T, that would mean we'd be spending nearly $250K per $35K (1-year) job created, or 250K per $70K (2-year) job.
By contrast, if the funds were spent strictly on creating jobs, it would create 25M jobs!
This is another substantially "pork-laden, pet-project" bill, that will have little real effect on consumer confidence or turn around the looming Depression.
Swift, decisive government intervention in the financial and middle class sectors might have had a chance of averting disaster. But the TARP initiative was never capable of achieving its stated objective, now or ever, and neither is the pending Stimulus Bill.
We are about to walk over the ledge and into the abyss while the hyenas feed.
