Wait! I thought the South was where all the jobs are!

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Jobs.

Although the official time frame for "The Great Recession" was December 2007 through June 2009, for the millions of long term un and underemployed, the daily reality is that not only has the recession never ended, it is more applicable to The Great Depression than it is to any of the various acknowledged recessions since the end of WWII. One of the articles of faith from the always surprised Economists is that job creation lags other indicators, yet here we are, over two years since the "end" of the last recession and the official unemployment rate is still at 9.1% with the underemployed figure at 16.2% for August 2011.

Each week on Thursday, there's a report of the Initial Jobless Claims for the week before. Like many of the earlier weeks, last week's report forced the headline writers to find the lone tidbit of almost good news to concentrate on in their ledes. From Reuters:

(Reuters) - Americans filed fewer new claims for jobless benefits last week but the decline was not enough to dispel worries the economy was dangerously close to falling into a new recession.

Applications for unemployment benefits dropped 9,000 to 423,000 in the week ended September17, the Labor Department said on Thursday. That was roughly in line with expectations.l

Of course, once again, the earlier report had been revised upwards (from 428K reported on September 15). It is not going too far out on a limb to predict that the 423K reported for September 22 will be revised upwards on September 29.

I did not go too far out on a limb back in June when I first predicted a "double-dip" and it still was a short limb when I reiterated the prediction in July. Nouriel Roubini has made the same prediction last Thursday documented from his tweets (via Business Insider). A few days earlier (September 19), Roubini had written this op-ed on how to keep the coming Recession from being a Depression.

Economist Magazine offered this analysis of Growth and jobs across the country on September 15. Their close:

Two things seem clear, however. Across the country, a greater level of demand growth is necessary to boost employment. And at the same time, there are places within the country experiencing strong growth which aren't producing the jobs we'd expect them to. If America could find ways to make San Jose just a little more like Dallas, that might make a meaningful dent in America's employment problems.

MSNBC offered this article with a touch of good news involved, i.e., that there is some hiring going on, although not to a level necessary to reduce the official un and underemployment rates. One point to note from that MSNBC link - all the reasons offered for the slow hiring have to do with demand levels and not the skills of the workers.

Today's (Tuesday, September 27) NY Times had this article analyzing some BLS figures on how the economic map is being redrawn due to the lingering economic ill-effects:

When the unemployment rate rose in most states last month, it underscored the extent to which the deep recession, the anemic recovery and the lingering crisis of joblessness are beginning to reshape the nation’s economic map.

The once-booming South, which entered the recession with the lowest unemployment rate in the nation, is now struggling with some of the highest rates, recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show.

Several Southern states — including South Carolina, whose 11.1 percent unemployment rate is the fourth highest in the nation — have higher unemployment rates than they did a year ago. Unemployment in the South is now higher than it is in the Northeast and the Midwest, which include Rust Belt states that were struggling even before the recession.

...snip...

The long cycle of “lose jobs, gain jobs, lose jobs” that kept Georgia’s unemployment rate at 10.2 percent in August — the same as it was a year earlier — is illustrated by Union City, a small city on the outskirts of Atlanta.

It suffered a blow when the last store in its darkened mall, Sears, announced that it would soon close. But the city had other irons in the fire: a few big companies were hiring, and earlier this year Dendreon, a biotech company that makes a cancer drug, opened a plant there, lured in part by state and local subsidies.

Then, this month, Dendreon said it would lay off more than 100 workers at the new plant as part of a national “restructuring.”

...snip...

In a sign of how severe the downturn has been, the Brookings analysis found that only 16 of the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas have regained more than half of the jobs they lost during the recession.

So here we are. After all the years of hearing about the Rust Belt failing everyone and how the South was the leader in everything, well, maybe not so much. Businesses will accept all the subsidies and tax breaks in the world, but they will cut and run at the slightest sign of problems. Of course, I'm from a small town in Kentucky that bragged over the years about bringing in jobs from the Rust Belt (make sure you use plenty of Post-It Notes to keep the folks in my hometown working). I would almost suggest the governors of Georgia and South Carolina might want to contact their rust belt counterparts for some advice except that most of the governors involved seem to be intent on learning the wrong lessons.

And because I can: