Reuters blogger: High unemployment will last a long time

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It’s always a bit dangerous to try to meld the two surveys which make up the payrolls report, but I’m detecting a trend here: insofar as employers are hiring new people, they’re hiring new entrants into the labor force, rather than people making up the ranks of the unemployed. Maybe it’s recent graduates, maybe it’s former stay-at-home moms who were never claiming unemployment but who are now getting jobs. Maybe it’s immigrants. But the big picture is that employment growth is more or less keeping track with population growth, leaving no new jobs for the 14 million unemployed Americans…

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Is there anything the government can do to bring unemployment down? Or is it now too late? If we are indeed in the early months of a double-dip recession, than I think it is too late: unemployment is more likely to go up than it is down from here. And even if the economy’s still managing to eke out modest growth, I don’t see much hope that the unemployment rate will come down to a remotely acceptable level any time soon. Realistically, America’s unemployed are here to stay.