Census data suggest that the recession is depressing the U.S. birthrate

And it appears that people started feeling uneasy rather early on during the slowdown.

The number of babies born grew by only 0.9% in the year to July 2008, compared with a rise of 2.7% the year before.

The figures have given rise to speculation that families anticipated hard times by having fewer children.

"If prospects look worse for families, they're going to be very likely to have fewer kids," said Mark Mather of the Population Research Bureau.

The surprising part of the figures is that they reflect family planning decisions made from early 2007, when there were only a few signs of an economic slowdown in the US.

The first real sign of the financial meltdown was in August 2007 when credit markets froze up, but unemployment was still low and consumer confidence high.

The evidence is more correlative than causal, but it doesn't strain the imagination to think that economic uncertainty would make people more cautious about reproductive decisions.

What 'better jobs'?

Every time conservatives open their mouths these days they confirm how wise the American electorate was to boot them from power in the last two election cycles.

In a piece about what it describes as a patchwork system of social programs for the needy, the New York Times quotes a Heritage Foundation flack named Stuart Butler on why social programs are a bad idea during a recession.

Aid programs spend hundreds of billions of dollars and reach tens of millions of people; the food stamp program alone covers more than one in 10 Americans. Yet the safety net leaves few camps satisfied. Liberals say programs are weak compared with other rich countries and are overly deferential to states. Conservatives fault costs and complexity and warn that aid can do harm.

With generous programs “you could be discouraging people from seeking better jobs,” said Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation.

What 'better jobs' is he talking about?

The unemployment rate is almost 9 percent. Nearly 14 million people are out of work. Even though the rate of job loss has slowed due to President Obama's stimulus strategy, the economy is still losing more than 500,000 jobs a month.

Yet the Heritage Foundation thinks the problem is that unemployment benefits and food stamps are sapping people's motivation to "seek better jobs." What planet do these people come from where good, well-paying jobs grow on trees and all you have to do is go out and pick one?

Conservatism is a bankrupt, impotent movement that has failed to meet the felt needs of the people that it seeks to serve. Its failures are manifest and are the direct result of its slavish devotion to disproved ideas.

But our establishment media outlets still deem these ideas worthy of consideration. The New York Times included Butler's assertion about the harm posed by generous social programs and left it completely unchallenged, as though its validity is beyond dispute. They didn't even require him to explain what he meant. He was simply allowed to assert that aid to the needy during a recession of historical magnitude is a bad thing, and the Times was willing to take his word for it.

It would be laughable if it wasn't so dangerous.

Depression

Some very smart people are starting to get very worried about the fundamental health of our economy.

Atrios doesn't want to sound apocalyptic, but...

[I] really am seriously worried about the economy going forward. Aside from the lost wealth in housing and elsewhere, we have lots of lost jobs, and it's hard to see a lot of those jobs coming back any time soon. The construction industry is going to be dead for awhile for obvious reasons. A lot of bubble jobs in the mortgage industry aren't coming back any time soon. Not quite sure what's going on with the auto industry, long term.

The worry is that there isn't just some weak demand in certain sectors which a bit of adjustment will sort out eventually, but that instead there's a structural shift which will require a much longer transition period before things get better. I'm worried, anyway.

And Robert Reich flat out calls it a depression.

Every lost job has a multiplier effect throughout the economy. For every person who no longer has a job and can't find another, or is trying to enter the job market and can't find one, there are at least three job holders who become more anxious that they may lose their job. Almost every American right now is within two degrees of separation of someone who is out of work. This broader anxiety expresses itself as less willingness to spend money on anything other than necessities. And this reluctance to spend further contracts the economy, leading to more job losses.

Capital markets may or may not unfreeze under the combined heat of the Treasury and the Fed, but what happens to Wall Street is becoming less and less relevant to Main Street. Anxious Americans will not borrow even if credit is available to them. And ever fewer Americans are good credit risks anyway.

All this means that the real economy will need a larger stimulus than the $787 billion already enacted. To be sure, only a small fraction of the $787 billion has been turned into new jobs so far. The money is still moving out the door. But today's bleak jobs report shows that the economy is so far below its productive capacity that much more money will be needed.

This is still not the Great Depression of the 1930s, but it is a Depression. And the only way out is government spending on a very large scale. We should stop worrying about Wall Street. Worry about American workers. Use money to build up Main Street, and the future capacities of our workforce.

The Democrats have to stop playing games with the Republicans. They have to stop buying into the GOP narrative about the deficit. We cannot afford to worry about the deficit right now. The government has to spend more money to put people back to work.

Reich says excess manufacturing capacity, such as idled automobile plants, should be utilized to build mass-transit vehicles, wind turbines, and electric cars. He thinks the government should start hiring people to do the hands-on work of making homes more energy efficient.

Obviously, the Republicans will shriek "socialism" at the first mention of such a plan. They should be ignored. The White House and its congressional allies should steamroll them to put a new Works Progress Administration in place. The government should literally start hiring hundreds of thousands of people to do work that needs to be done on our country's infrastructure. It will put money into people's pockets, revitalize the retail sector of the economy, and begin to reverse decades of neglect of public resources.

Worst job losses since 1974

American employers slashed the most jobs since December 1974 as a recession firmly grips the U.S. economy.

The politically-sensitive unemployment rate jumped to 6.7 percent, the highest reading since 1993.

The Bush Recession

Forget what Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity would have you believe about a so-called "Obama Recession." It's as real as Bigfoot.

We are in a recession, and have been for a year, but the president-elect obviously had nothing to do with it. This is the George W. Bush recession.

The U.S. economy entered a recession in December 2007, a committee of economists at the private National Bureau of Economic Research said Monday. The economy reached a peak in December and has been declining since, according to the business cycle dating committee of the NBER. The committee does not judge a recession as two consecutive quarterly declines in gross domestic product; rather, it looks at four key monthly economic indicators, including employment, industrial output and sales. Employment peaked in December.