(Roughly) Daily

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Arguments rage as to how the U.S. sailed into the economic eddy in which we’re caught, and as to how we should navigate out.  (Your correspondent’s thoughts, FWIW, are littered among the postings in his other blog.)  But the situation is what it is…  a situation that the folks at ProPublica have profiled, current as to data available this month.

Some selections:

– Annual rate at which the GDP grew this year: 1.3 percent between April and June, 0.4 percent between January and March
– Average annual GDP growth from 1998-2007: 3.02 percent
– Total jobs lost since January 2008: 8.7 million
– Total jobs recovered since January 2008: 1.8 million
– Unemployment rate in July 2011: 9.1 percent
– The “natural unemployment rate”: 5 percent
– Months that the unemployment rate has been around 9 percent or more: 28
– Number of unemployed people in July 2011: 13.9 million
– Number of long-term unemployed people in June 2011: 6.3 million, or 44.4 percent of the unemployed
– Number of long-term unemployed people in July 2011: 6.2 million, still about 44.4 percent of the unemployed
– Years it will take to get back to an unemployment rate of 5 percent: four years if we’re adding jobs at 350,000 per month; 11 years if we’re adding jobs at the 2005 rate of 210,000 per month

More at ProPublica… In an economy the fundamental premise of which is consumption, and in which employment gains demand a GDP growth rate of over 2%, it’s a sobering picture.

As we contemplating re-stuffing our mattresses, we might recall that it was on this date in 1835 that the New York Sun began a series of six articles detailing the discovery of civilized life on the moon.  Now known as “The Great Moon Hoax,” the articles attributed the “discovery” to Sir John Herschel, the greatest living astronmer of the day.  Herschel was initially amused, wryly noting that his own real observations could never be as exciting.  But ultimately he tired of having to answer questioners who believed the story.  The series was not discovered to be a hoax for several weeks after its publication and, even then, the newspaper did not issue a retraction.

The “ruby amphitheater” on the Moon, per the New York Sun (source)