Unemployment Is Still Getting Worse

Economic prognosticators have been telling us for a few months now that the United States economy has bottomed out and will be rebounding soon. After all, the financial institutions and banks that were in so much trouble a few months ago are now posting record profits and wanting to give their management huge bonuses. So that means everything's all right now, right? Wrong!

While the corporations and the rich may be doing great, the economy is still going downhill for the rest of us. To realize that, all you have to do is look at the latest unemployment numbers. They paint a picture of an economy continuing to crumble.

The job losses for June were actually larger than expected by the experts. Our economy lost over 467,000 jobs last month. That's nearly another half a million American workers out of a job. I don't know how many more months we can keep on losing hundreds of thousands of jobs, but so far, there doesn't seem to be an end in sight. It won't be much longer until we are at Great Depression unemployment rates.

The unemployment rate for the United States now sits at 9.5%, the highest rate since 1983 -- 26 years ago. And if you add in the people who are working part-time but want full-time work, the people who have run out of unemployment benefits and the people who have just given up on finding work, that rate would be much higher.

Since December of 2007 (which most people recognize as the start of the recession) the American economy has lost more than 7.2 million jobs. The total number of unemployed people is now 14.7 million people, according to the government (not counting the underemployed).

The fact is that the economy has not turned around. A couple of months ago, some were celebrating because they said job losses were slowing -- the number of jobs lost were lower than the month before. But that is no cause for celebration. As long as the country keeps showing a net loss of jobs in each ensuing month, the economy has not bottomed out. It is still getting worse.

This recession won't be over for most Americans until the amount of jobs created is larger than the amount of jobs lost for several months in a row. To say anything else is just insulting to ordinary Americans.