When do you think the economy will recover?

[kentuck]

and we will have full employment?

[Ikonoklast]

1. The jobs that have been lost, many of them will never return.

Unless this government can find a way to keep a manufacturing base here, there will be a slide in our economy that will be irreversible. The financial service economy model will not hold. As the center of economic power shifts to the East, so will the primary place to invest in those markets. Wall Street will be a little less congested in the future.

Investors will continue to finance the ventures that guarantee the highest return. Manufacturing requires a lot of capital, and assets, and a lower rate of return than the financial sector casino.

[Democracyinkind]

2. 4 - full employment is NOT a possible feature of our current system.

Mills knew it, Marx knew it, and even ol' Milton confessed to it before the grim reaper got a hold on him.

[Dreamer Tatum]

9. It depends on what you mean by full employment

There is a natural rate of unemployment that is consistent with job seeking, career changes, new entrants to the workforce, retirement, and the desire not to work or be underemployed.

That rate has historically been thought to reside between 4% and 6%, and it has also been thought that the we were very near full employment toward the end of the Clinton years and sometime after the 2001 recession.

I think there will be a recovery in terms of GDP within the next 12 months, but I think it will take 36 months for jobs to return UNDER IDEAL CIRCUMSTANCES. I think a weak dollar will generally help unemployment, but if the dollar becomes too weak, interest rates will have to climb to levels that endanger investment.

Really, it boils down to inflation, when you think about it.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

3. the word economy will have to be redefined and new jobs will have to be

discovered. The old use and throw away system is no longer sustainable. my .02

[Deja Q]

5. Which means companies doing manufacturing better improve their quality...

And the companies profiting from the manufacturers will have to settle for slightly smaller profits, like $10.5 billion versus $11 billion is going to kill them or anything...

[timeforpeace]

4. Used to believe college was a must. Now there's too many with useless degrees.

[ixion]

6. there is really one goal for education:

To give people the skills required to learn.

Unfortunately, K-12 and most college majors fail to do this.

College was a great place to hone learning skills. That should really be the goal, rather than the almighty focus on a degree.

Disclaimer: I was a chronic college student. I was in college for seven-and-a-half years. I have two majors and many minors, but no degree.

[FSogol]

7. I disagree. Many degrees are too costly but are not worthless.

Want to study archeology, history or English lit? Do it but make sure you have marketable skills to go along with your education. Computer skills, writing skills, teaching skills, and business classes will make your degree apply to many more types of jobs than the typical ones in your field. Also, giant loans to pay for degrees that will lead to low paying jobs are insane. Try taking your basic University courses at a community college or taking the occasional year off and earning your way as you go to avoid loans. Avoid out of state schools unless you have big scholarship money.

[quiller4]

8. Many of the lost jobs will never return but in a year or less

the market will have recovered sufficiently that many of the baby boomers will feel comfortable retiring thus "creating" job openings. I know I have a number of friends 63-66 who have been watching their 401k and now feel like they will retire sometime next spring instead of working another year or two like they felt they must when the Dow hit its March lows.

Real health care reform will increase the number of boomer who leave the wokforce. There are quite a few who are working now only because they fear that they couldn't buy private insurance because of chronic medical conditions.

Because boomers are still in the work force in significant numbers and have been less impacted by layoffs than other age groups, their retirements will help reduce unemployment more than many other job creation efforts.

[Sinti]

10. I think we're looking at the wrong definition of the word recover

Our economy has been very sick for a very long time. Huge multinational monopolies control the majority of the money and jobs. They decide what gets done and what value both labor and material have, for the most part. We need to actually break these monopolies up before we can even begin to talk about real economic issues and values in this country. The rest of the world suffers from this also, some more than others.

These multinational conglomerates are corporations, therefore by definition their obligation is to gather more and more money to themselves, and deliver that money to their stockholders - most of which are also multinational corporations - banks, insurers, private investment groups like Carlyle, hedge funds... We can't get the thing going again, with jobs, because all the money is already at the top.

I think people need to understand that time moves one way, forward only. You can't go back, if you did you'd find that perfect time you dream of never really existed. We cannot make something work for us today if we're constantly trying to return it to where it was 50 years ago.

We need to actually allow ourselves to move forward, get smarter and create a new paradigm that serves all of us as human beings. In addition to breaking up the monopolies, we need to invest in small mom and pop style businesses, those that serve our community and create local jobs and local value.

The people who earn the least, at this time, provide the most value - think teachers, nurses and other care givers, builders, farmers and farm employees, people that make and do stuff we actually need and use. It's upside down at the moment, IMO.

If by recovery you mean a return to sanity - I don't know, it depends on how forcefully the people demand it, and how well we can get together and get along to forward our common interests.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

11. In a consumer driven economy consumers have to consume. No jobs, no consumers, no recovery.

And, the only way for those jobs to come back is to lower wages in order to compete with the low wages paid abroad.

It's already happening. Wages are dropping because there are more unemployed looking for work who will take less just to survive.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091010/ap_on_bi_ge/us_job_openings

And, unemployment is still expected to rise.

And, our brilliant government is still spending borrowed money to fight very expensive lost wars instead building infrastructure, providing education/job training, or "providing for the general welfare".