More US jobs have been lost during this administration than since Herbert Hoover's time: 3.2 million jobs gone and thereare now 9 million unemployed. (Hoover's term was worse, but is that any consolation?)

The "strong recovery" being promised isn't going to fix the problem. The economy will get better, but most of the jobs lost will stay lost. Companies will do better, but Americans need to brace for a lower quality of life than their parents and grandparents had.

Historically, about 40-45% of jobs lost during a recession have been recovered quickly (a relative term if you're one of the unemployed), then more jobs were slowly added to the economy as the country and economy grew.

It's different this time.

New jobless claims were down to "only" 395,000 in the last reported week [400,000 is the economists' "magic number" for this measure]. New jobs created were just 0.057 million. At that rate, it would take 56 years to recover the jobs lost during the Bush administration, so things aren't exactly booming yet.

More than 85% of the jobs lost (2.8 million) were in manufacturing and many of those moved to Mexico, China, India and other low wage countries. Worse yet, this time around non-manufacturing jobs have left and are continuing to leave the country.

The reason is simple: money. The average annual salary of an electrical engineer with five years experience in San Jose, CA is $106,000; in Bombay it's about $5,000 [BW 10/6/03: Engineering on the Cheap]. In the year 2000, there were 195,000 H1B visas issued to allow engineers and other high tech workers into the US - this year it's down to 65,000, since they can be hired even more cheaply to work in their own countries.

The job exports also affect another measure of how the economy is doing: productivity. That's essentially the Gross Domestic Product divided by the number of employed.

Productivity appears to be going up, but all is not as it seems.

When Levi shuts their last US factory and fires 2,000 workers, the company contribution to the GDP remains the same but there are that many fewer workers so productivity "goes up" even though nothing really changed (at least not for the better). Add the 130,000 H1B workers that are not in the country now and you get another "productivity boost." And the millions of manufacturing jobs gone forever lift the measure yet again.

The US is well on the way to becoming even more of a service economy than it is (80%). Your grandchildren may have to look forward to a future career of waiting for cruise ships to dock, hoping there are going to be a lot of tourists, if current trends continue.

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