Forecasting Unemployment

Time Magazine, the most recent issue: "America now faces the direst employment landscape since the Depression."

On April 7th of this year, the Chronicler (that's me), responding to an article in the NYT on returning to full employment, wrote:

"This reporting in the NYT really is economic 'wishful-thinking.' How can we conceivably return to the kind of economy we had in the recent housing-bubble of the past 5 years, or the dot-com bubble before that? Are we finally going to attempt to move into some kind of non-bubble economy, or are we fated to just have one bubble after another, followed by collapse? But the reason we have to have economic bubbles is that a non-bubble US economy wouldn't support full-employment or the kind of affluence we have experienced over the last two decades, and we haven't yet accepted that reality as a nation."

"All of this wishful thinking is predicated on increasing debt levels which are simply not sustainable for very much longer. Not only that, but the looming oil shortage and the corresponding price increases (which we tasted last summer) are going to really throw us for a loop. When I read statements like that above, I realize how out-of-touch our economic conventional wisdom really is."