For those who don't know, Japan suffered during the 90's a period non existent growth, persistent unemployment and massive efforts by the government proved utterly futile. It was called "The Lost Decade" for good reason, as you could have ripped it off their calendar and it would not have made any real difference in their society fiscally speaking.

For us, the 2000's has been our own lost decade, only what worries me is ours is shaping up to be even longer. The current crowing is how our national unemployment rate has moved an almost imperceptible tick downward, from 9.7 to 9.6% yet when I checked the stats on all the major cities it showed theirs had actually gone up. Of LA, New York, Seattle, Houston, Washington DC and Chicago, only Seattle had a drop, the others have gone up. The worrisome thing is major cities tend to be the economic canaries, when they drop dead the rest of the country tends to follow suit so whatever minor hiccup they are cheering about is likely to be the calm before the next bout of storm.

Worse yet, if this 'recovery' proves to be like the last two, where there was supposed increases in company profits, this was born from streamlining and downsizing so unlike say the internet boom, the manufacturing boom of the 50's and 50's, these recoveries came from cannibalizing their staff not from infrastructural growth. As we have no real industry or technology that seems poised to ignite our commercial fire this is likely to be yet another "jobless recovery" and if that's the case be ready to have double digit unemployment become a mainstay of our society.

Be ready for both sides to do... nothing. To some extent I understand why, nobody has any real ideas that could both work AND they are willing to embrace. Corporate america is terrified of the idea of competing with anybody, the government's idea of stimulus is to pork barrel project which only benefits a tiny handful, and the citizenry has been conditioned to neither want or be able to start their own enterprises.

Looks like the Randians are getting their 'Atlas Shrugged' scenario after all.
I wonder if they'll realize how much that would really suck.
They're going to find out.