Chart of the day

Today was a banner day for government as our elected betters paused and decided to spend five minutes giving a shit about the unemployed. It was about 50 days too late and will invariably crop up the next time around, but hey, this is as close to progress on the economy as this country is allowed to have.

So they extended unemployment benefits, big deal. What about that part where they get together and figure out how to make there be not as many unemployed people? What would that take, besides a miracle? Actually, what would it take just to get us to the point where we were back before everything turned to shit?

Well, according to the good people at the Brookings Institute, 200,000 jobs a month for somewhere around 150 months. 12.5 years.


In case you haven't been paying attention, we aren't creating 200,000 jobs a month. We don't look to start anytime soon either. The Center For Economic and Policy Research is slightly more optimistic, saying that it will only take until 2014 to get us to 2007 employment levels, 2021 if you take into account the 6.5 million people that will have entered the job force between 2007 and 2014. In both scenarios, that's if everything goes swimmingly and starts doing so around a week from now.

So in other words, things will get back on track shortly after pigs learn to fly but not before they fly out of your ass. Hope that brightened your day.