American Toughness and the Hard Work Ahead before We Can Return to Peak Employment Levels

Long Road Ahead for Most American States lays out the unemployment forecast for U.S. states and when they are projected to return to their past employment peaks.

Here's the forecast:

"These analysts have projected when each state will likely return to its past peak employment, as shown in the map below:

Source: IHS Global Insight.

Across the country, there are 4.7 percent fewer jobs today than there were when the recession began in December 2007. And remember that the United States population has grown in the last five years, so if the economy were healthy there would be more jobs today than there were then. This analysis only models when we’ll be back to square one."

And then there's the developing European story. They are in even worse shape than we are, both currently and going forward as well.

So are all countries in the developed world prepared to do the hard work to get our debt and deficits under control so economic growth can resume strongly, thereby securing our future prosperity? In that regard, while I believe that we Americans will get the job done, I'm not that confident about Europe's prospects.

New Austerity Incites a Bitterness the Postwar Generation Did Without says this about the outlook and challenge for Europeans:

"As it confronts its massive debt problem, though, and a new austerity threatens to become its default setting, Europe seems to have lost sight of the fact that it has been there before; that the baby boom generation found its roots in postwar hardship; that, as Mr. Judt (historian) suggested, the huge affluence of more recent years could barely have been imagined as people struggled to shake off the gloom of war.

The difference now is that the taste for wealth, the aspiration to automatic betterment and the assumption of ever-expanding horizons have become universal, cemented by the growth of the European Union and the adoption of a single currency, the euro, that has spread a leavening of prosperity among the 17 countries in the union that use it.

In Mr. Judt’s early days, after the grinding deprivation of a world war, austerity trumped global conflict. Now, the point of departure is prosperity, a fool’s paradise in which Europeans came to see affluence as a state of being, a birthright.

As politicians slowly and reluctantly confront the reality that the bounty days are over, what makes the challenge so explosive is not simply a question of economics; it is one of expectations and cultural divides."

Of course, many of the same arguments about the mindset of the Europeans can be made about us, too. That said, Americans have always answered the call. We did it in World Wars I and II, and we did it during the Cold War period as well.

Now we're being called upon again to get another difficult job done in order to pass on to future generations what prior generations gave to us.

So it's gut check time around the world and a good time to be betting on Americans to rise to the challenge.

All that said, this fix will take a whole lot of hard work, time and cooperation among the citizenry.

Throughout history that's been our country's response whenever times were tough, and the chips were down. It will be that way this time, too.

Thanks. Bob.