Kirk Watson: “the American economy has been mired in recession since March of 2001. This past December saw the unemployment rate rise…”

“the American economy has been mired in recession since March of 2001. This past December saw the unemployment rate rise to 6 percent, meaning that one in every 17 American workers was out of work. One of the most troubling aspects of this rescission is the amount of time that workers have been idle. During the Clinton economic expansion of the 1990s, America dramatically reduced long-term unemployment, those workers who had been out of work 27 weeks or more. From February of 1993 until February of 2001, roughly the amount of time Bill Clinton was in office, long-term unemployment fell by two-thirds. That is 1.2 million long-term unemployed Americans who went back to work. But in less than 2 years of this administration, there is a recession and the administration has managed to completely erase those gains. By this past December, the administration's economic mismanagement has managed to push long-term unemployment back up to where it was when his father was in office. I remember feeling a certain amount of deja vu after having another President Bush in office. But I do not think that many people realized that this administration would mismanage the economy so badly that we would return to economic stagnation reminiscent of the early 1990s. But these broader economic statistics only tell half the story.…”