This morning the Labor Department clued us in to something most of us living out here in the real world already know: no jobs for you.

New claims for unemployment insurance jumped by 37,000 to a seasonally adjusted 464,000, the Labor Department said Thursday.

What always kills me about these official reports is that we are about to be bombarded with a day’s worth of declining markets, and politicians pontificating and talking heads jabbering incessantly on the 24 hours news networks about this “news” in reaction to the official report that is no news at all to those who are actually working in the world outside the bubble, much less those not working at all.

Just lately I’ve been wondering how long the government will be able to keep up the sideshow of using the grim reality of unemployment as useful talking points for the upcoming November election without actually addressing said grim reality in any substantive way.

I’m just hoping they will wake up and grasp some portion of the reality we are in before we slide all the way into depression. But then maybe I’m being too heavily influenced by my recent reading material.

You try reading Paul Krugman’s The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, and following that up with Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America by Adam Cohen and not getting a little alarmed at the parallels to between our slide into the Great Depression and the hole it feels like we are inexorably sliding into right now out here beyond the bubble where most of us live.

Come to think of it, I recommend you do just that: read them.

Tags: economy, Great Depression, jobs, recession, U. S. Department of Labor, unemployment

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