Despite diamond's typical Republican insensitivity, I blame this on a few things:
1) The economy is still in a recession, especially in regards to employment. I don't give a rat's ass about corporate profits, which says that we haven't been in a recession since 2001/2002.
2) Concentration of employment. A hundred years ago, people didn't migrate that far, and jobs were located appropriately. Fast forward 60 years and interstate highways gutted local communities in favor of large cities. Fast forward 20-30 years from there, and now we only need a couple of job centers in the largest cities (think LA or NYC, for instance) to cover the entire nation. The challenge right now is that even this is changing. We only need a couple of centers to cover the entire world, and with the allure of cheap labor and tax incentives to outsource, any language-independent position is threatened with being sent abroad. Hence, soon enough, most entry-level jobs will likely be sent abroad, with CEOs/executives remaining in the U.S.
3) Internships. Sure, we had the 13th Amendment that banned slavery and "involuntary servitude," but who needs slaves these days when we can "force" high school students to "volunteer" and have college students "pay" their college/university to "intern" for free? Hence, there is little to no incentive for businesses to expand their hiring of entry-level workers, and with such an uncertain economy, we have unemployed experienced workers and employed experienced workers who lost their ass on their stock-invested 401K and won't be retiring anytime soon.
Overall, there certainly are things that politicians could do to help improve on this economy, aside from tax cuts, but they won't do it, because their allegiance is to business, not the people. Bush more than made it clear in the debates that he thinks the only people that are unemployed in this country are uneducated racial minorities. Well, with attitudes like that, expect more of the same for a long time.
Melon