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‘US job crisis to linger for years to come’

Economists say the job crisis in the United States is likely to persist for many more years despite a government report indicating recent improvements in employment levels.

A recent report by the US Labor Department indicated that 200 thousand jobs were created in the month of December, bringing the official unemployment rate down to 8.5 percent.

There are still more than six million more jobs needed to reach the job levels prior to the recession that started in 2007. Data shows that 5.6 million Americans have remained unemployed for at least six months.

Princeton University economist Paul Krugman notes that at December’s pace, it would take at least 10 years to get back to the pre-recession levels of employment.

Paul Sheldon Foote, professor at the California State University, said in an interview with Press TV on Saturday that “if people don’t have jobs or have lower paid jobs, they aren’t spending as much and that hurts employment.”

Foote also pointed out that America’s high-quality jobs are declining, adding that “politicians are saying that the line is going up and not down. Well, what kind of employment? Are we talking about people working in hamburger restaurants or people working in high-tech factories?”

He also referred to the millions of middle class jobs which have been outsourced by US corporations to countries like China where labor is cheap.

“Many heads of corporations say that they have to build factories in other countries because the American workforce is not educated well enough… there’s no reason to believe that any of the factories that went to China or other places will ever be coming back here,” Foote concluded.

Meanwhile, higher prices for clothing and cars in the US as well as housing rents accelerated the inflation to the fastest annual pace in nearly three years.

Experts also think the US economy will dip into another recession in 2012 as the US Treasury report to Congress forecasts the government’s debt will rise to USD 19.6 trillion by 2015.

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