It’s hardly a surprise to those living in Nevada that the unemployment rate is high, 14 percent more or less depending on who’s counting. The state is in a hole because of poor tax structure, decreased tourist visits and encroaching California Indian casinos, among other things.

And all the experts are predicting a slow growth and return to the basic 3 or 4 percent unemployment.
The Obama Adminnistration in Washington says we’re on the track to recovery and if we can just control the lunacy that is the New York Stock Exchange and others we’ll be all right.

Yeah.

But nobody seems to be looking at the ghost in the closet, why unemployment stays high with no significant improvement in sight. Nobody looks at how the economy actually works — forget about the crap shoot that is the NYSE, the derivatives debacle, AIG and all that junk.

Yes, junk, because the NYSE and Wall Street are no longer what they were designed to do — to raise capital for new businesses. It’s now a place where the inside traders control the indexes, where globalization has permitted one smart operator to defuse the financial world. (Read “One Week in December” about how one man could have caused the disaster of our financial world. By a Brit, no less.)

Instead, look at a key figure in the usual Commerce Department reporting: worker productivity. That’s the measure of how productive workers were in a given time period. Look at it and you’ll see that the figure over the years has continued to increase, incrementally, to be sure, but increased steadily.
Which means, of course, that fewer workers are needed to produce the same amount of goods.

Combine that with the fact that the United States continues to actually produce fewer and fewer things. That’s actual goods — hammers, saws, electric tools (there don’t seem to be any American power drills on the market ,for instance). Much of an American car is built with foreign parts, or such as Toyota manufacture with imported parts.

So we need fewer and fewer workers to produce the fewer actual goods we need. And since we don’t produce much in the way of actual hard goods, we will need fewer and fewer workers in the future. And the concept of the United States becoming an information technology resource giant to replace all the hard goods with software doesn’t seem to be working; that’s a myth. India is right up there with us in software, as are many European countries.

Well, to the point.

We’re not going to get back to 3 or 4 percent unemployment.

We’re going to get worse and worse as jobs shrink for good, but more people keep coming into the job market. We’re at 300 million citizens (again, more or less counting illegal immigration) right now, and if you’re looking at where the jobs are, check the agricultural business. Not owners but workers. Plenty of picking and stooping jobs there. But of course, the agbiz people that run those farms don’t want Americans there — they would have to pay taxes, minimum wages at least and furnish decent living and working conditions. So little job growth there.

Back to the point: We have too many people for too few jobs, and that isn’t going to change. Don’t figure on the trades to take up the slack — yes, plumbers and electricians, carpenters will continue to work, but for our industrial sector, it’s a dead end.

Sum it up: too many people, to few jobs ever to come. So unemployment will not only stay where it is, it will get worse. And then what do we do?

Start to build things in the U.S. of A? Maybe, if we still know how.