DN Editorial: Unemployment? What unemployment?

THE EXPERTS WHO calculate these things say the Great Recession has been over for two years now. But you would have a hard time persuading the 25 million Americans who are unemployed or underemployed or too discouraged to even look for work. Or the countless others who fear they may join their ranks.

Last week's report from the Labor Department confirmed what many Americans knew without needing a cable TV pundit to tell them: The mild improvement in job creation that we saw early this year is fading fast: First-time claims for unemployment benefits have been above 400,000 for the past 11 weeks, making for an official unemployment rate of 9.1 percent. And things aren't going to get much better, according to the Federal Reserve Bank, which downgraded its already pessimistic predictions for the near-term.

Yet as the problem gets worse, Washington is paying less attention to it. Instead, politicians on all sides have achieved a weird kind of bipartisanship: They're all obsessed with the federal deficit.

A study by the National Journal illustrated this odd disconnect: It counted the number of times major newspapers used the words "unemployment" and "deficit" in headlines or first sentences of their stories over the past two years and found a dramatic shift from a focus on ways to jump-start job creation to cries for "austerity." Mentions of unemployment have been dwindling while the word "deficit" has been rising. Last month, "deficit" beat out "unemployment," 201-63.

It's bad enough that the conservatives are still getting away with saying that more tax cuts for the rich will result in more jobs, when all evidence says just the opposite is true. The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, passed 10 years ago this month, ushered in a decade of the slowest economic growth since the end of World War II. What did grow was the gap between rich and poor.

Arguably worse is the timidity of many Democrats - including the one in the White House. They know that more economic stimulus is desperately needed to create jobs, yet are afraid to fight for it or even make the case for more government spending. That would mean admitting that the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act was underfunded.

Instead, President Obama focuses on how much better things are now and how much more humane his budget cuts would be than if Republicans were in charge. When asked about the chances that Obama will support a big jobs program, an aide says the White House is committed to "living within our means."

Meanwhile, Democrats complain that there aren't enough votes in Congress for even weak measures and that Republicans have a vested interest in a poor economy. After all, didn't Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell say that his party's No. 1 job is making Obama a one-term president?

It's time to move beyond Democrats' whining and inside-the-Beltway "experts' " efforts to change the subject. It is time to focus on cold facts.

Like the fact that 45 percent of unemployed workers - about 6.2 million Americans - have been out of work for more than six months, the highest percentage since the Great Depression. The longer a person is out of work, the harder it is to get a job. In fact, some employers won't even consider hiring someone who is already unemployed. Adding to the misery: About 1 million unemployed Americans have run out of unemployment benefits.

Actions speak louder than words, but when it comes to confronting the crisis of unemployment, we have had precious little of either. In the coming weeks, we will do our part to highlight the plight of unemployed Americans and why a jobless recovery is no recovery at all.