How Will The United States Create Nearly Twenty Million Jobs?

Approximately 7.8 million jobs have been lost in the United States since the start of the "Great Recession" in December of 2007.

That's some pretty sobering data.

Even more sobering is the fact that the economy needs to add an estimated 127,000 per month just to keep up with population growth (according to the Economic Policy Institute).

Paul Krugman made mention of this fact in a recent blog posting titled "The jobs deficit".

Krugman states that in order to achieve "more or less full employment" in 5 years, that the US economy will need to add around 18 million jobs.

How does he arrive at that number?

First off, we would need to replace the nearly 8 million jobs that have been lost since December of 2007.

Secondly, we would need to account for population growth by adding an additional 10.668 million jobs (7 years x 12 months x 127,000 jobs per month).

This is just another reason why so many people are predicting many years of high unemployment in the United States.

The economy is going to have a hard enough time replacing the 7.8 - 8 million jobs that were lost over the last two years - where are all of the additional jobs that are needed to keep up with population growth going to come from?

Source: Economic Policy Institute

Photo: JoshuaDavisPhotography.com


Filed under: The Economic Meltdown