Truest statement of the week

Well, the big issue in the minds of most Americans, not Wall Street, but most Americans, remains jobs. He mentioned a number, for instance, that the number of jobs is 7 million below what it was in 2008 at the peak. But what he didn't mention is in the intervening years, if things had been normal, something between 4 million, 5 million or more Americans would have entered the labor force. So, our jobs gap is not just 7 million. It's more like 11 million, 12 million. What was so disconcerting was the numbers that he reported about prospects of job growth, of employment -- of GDP growth in the range of around 3 percent. At that pace of GDP growth, employment growth will be so slow that the number of people that are unemployed will remain high for actually years to come. And it -- the numbers that he was quoting didn't seem to square that circle, very moderate growth, and the reality that at that moderate growth, unemployment is going to be a problem, not just this year, and not even just next year, but into 2013 and beyond.

-- economist Joseph Stiglitz on The NewsHour (PBS) last week