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Guest post: Unemployment expected to remain high

[This is another Onion-style piece from my father.]

Dateline: Capitol Hill June 22 , 2010. A Parallel Universe News Service. Deliberations continued today in committees in both houses of Congress attempting to design legislation to combat the nation’s stubbornly high jobless rate. While recovery in the financial sector and stock markets has inched forwarding during the past months, the nations’ unemployment rate has remained essentially unchanged since January when it reached a 26 year high. Economic pundits disagree sharply with the recommendations of economic experts and economic analysts have produced an analysis that supports neither side. The preposition of these postulates has produced a prognosis that is anything but positive, and parties on all sides of the issue foresee continued high jobless numbers into the third millennium.

Undersecretary of Labor Mitch Dimeener said Tuesday at a press conference that the problem was obviously that there were more people than were actually required to get everything done but that the supply and demand balance that is usually the seen in relation to other products is completely absent concerning the production of human beings. “There’s just more of them all the time,” he said. He suggested the acceleration of a program designed to decouple the creation of new jobs from any actual need to have a task performed or service rendered. A new Bureau of Unnecessary Careers will be formed within the Department to stimulate the creation of new jobs that fulfill needs that no one has. Grants would fund, among other things, a University of Michigan “ring tone design” graduate program and “pet motivational speaker” training course open to recent grads.

“The simple fact of the matter is we just need to bring these numbers into line,” said Kenan Sharp of the executive vice president of the Unemployed Workers Union. “We will only consider a strike as a last resort but immediate action is called for.” Sharp pointed out that the economy must produce over three hundred thousand new jobs every quarter for the unemployment rate to stay the same. That’s how many people enter the job market. “The economy is like a shark that gets a little big bigger and has to swim a little bit faster every day. When it finally croaks, it should be really big.” Sharp said that a huge and massive federal spending program should be initiated now to defibrillate the economy which might have “years of useful life left in it.” An infusion of 18 to 20 billion dollars in jobs programs could give the economy “at least a chance to get its affairs in order,” he said.

Michelle Bachman (R- Michigan) called for President Obama to “abandon his socialist agenda and get to work providing every American with a satisfying job.” When a reporter in the audience pointed out that government responsibility for the employment of the citizenry was a feature of “communist” rather than “socialist” governments, Ms. Bachman replied, “Huh?”

Nevada’s Tea Party candidate for senate, Sharon Angle, stated that the US needs to prepare for the new global economy by banning all public education and beginning a program to offer advanced home schooling degrees in computer programming, particle physics and musketry. A new form of currency based on the russet potato would insure that all jobseekers would be well motivated. Ms. Angle pointed out that most of the former residents of the continent have been replaced by Americans and suggested that the unemployed look for opportunities to fill the niches other species have left vacant. “We could have a good sized herd of MBA’s grazing in the Black Hills,” she said.

The global slowdown has caused even greater depression in the employment rate in other regions. On the Arabian Peninsula the jobless rate among males under twenty five approaches 30 percent and the novel tactic of inducing a few of these disaffected jobseekers to blow themselves to smithereens in a crowed market has become commonplace. “It’s effective,” said Labor’s Dimeener, “but not likely to catch on here.”

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