Closing the Jobs Gap

Found this neat tool by The Hamilton Project for estimating how many jobs would need to be created, per month in the US, to close the job gap.

http://www.hamiltonproject.org/jobs_gap/

To quote it:

If the economy adds about 208,000 jobs per month, which was the average monthly rate for the best year of job creation in the 2000s, then it will take until April 2020 to close the jobs gap.

Taking the latest "high" numbers noted from the June report of 195,000 jobs, it will still take over 7 years for the job gap to be closed if no further jobs are lost on a monthly basis.

For a better explanation of this, I'll quote this Guardian article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/05/june-jobs-report-us-economy

First, it is important to remember the size of the hole the economy is in. We are down roughly 8.5 million jobs from our trend growth path. We also need close to 100,000 jobs a month to keep pace with the underlying growth rate of the labor market. This means that even with the relatively good growth of the last few months, we were only closing the gap at the rate of 96,000 a month. At this pace, it will take up more than seven years to fill the jobs gap.

Our recovery is, as the Guardian's sub-headline for the above article states, anaemic at best. With the continual, steady loss of thousands of jobs per month, I'd say it's non-existent.

What do I mean by non-existent? From the Bureau of Labor Statistics for May, 2013:

Employers took 1,301 mass layoff actions in May involving 127,821 workers as measured
by new filings for unemployment insurance benefits during the month, the U.S. Bureau
of Labor Statistics reported today. (Data are seasonally adjusted.) Each mass layoff
involved at least 50 workers from a single employer. Mass layoff events increased by
102 from April, and the number of associated initial claims increased by 10,972. In
May, 276 mass layoff events occurred in the manufacturing sector resulting in 33,527
initial claims. Monthly mass layoff events are identified using administrative data
sources without regard to layoff duration.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/mmls.nr0.htm

The recovery is slow and jobless because we're on the wrong track. If we can adopt an economic policy that works, the economy will improve rapidly, jobs will need to be created to handle the demand, and a big chunk of the debt we keep hearing about will disappear as a result of the improving economy.

A world war might create a jobs demand

I'm pretty sure the world wouldn't miss N. Korea, we could start there.