It’s worth asking, in this context, whether Obama’s jobs bill would actually change that dynamic at all. It might help at the margin — if you’re working hard enough to burn through the fat reserves of highly-qualified graduates and moms and immigrants, you might eventually start cutting into the hard muscle mass of the long-term unemployed. But my gut feeling is that the effect of the jobs bill will be much bigger on employment figures than on unemployment figures.

Is there anything the government can do to bring unemployment down? Or is it now too late? If we are indeed in the early months of a double-dip recession, than I think it is too late: unemployment is more likely to go up than it is down from here. And even if the economy’s still managing to eke out modest growth, I don’t see much hope that the unemployment rate will come down to a remotely acceptable level any time soon. Realistically, America’s unemployed are here to stay. And we’re only just beginning to understand how that’s going to affect the political economy of the nation.