The idea that the US suffers from structural unemployment is a conservative red herring intended to justify government inaction in the face of an unemployment c

The idea that the US suffers from structural unemployment is a conservative red herring intended to justify government inaction in the face of an unemployment crisis that is gutting our generation, all the while spreading the misconception that the unemployed are all lazy or unskilled. In a situation of real structural unemployment, we would have a lot of unemployment in a few specific industries where consumer demand has collapsed (because people are spending money elsewhere), but have this offset by rising wages, rising prices, and massive business investment in other industries which produce things people want to buy instead. This is the story of the dot-com boom, where high school dropouts were trained into server admins because Disney and every other company out there wanted to run their own search engine. This is nothing close to what we see. The economy has been poor since 2001, and since 2008 employment has fallen in practically every sector except internet, health care and mining. Silicon Valley is a bright spot, but it's job creation is trivial in the scheme of things. And even here much of the activity has been driven by loose monetary policy rather than an underlying shift in consumer spending. The fact we aren't getting as many bubble stories these days also leads me to suspect that even in California things are now getting slightly worse -- something unexpected under the structural explanation where we'd expect things to be heating up even more in this situation.