Many members of the media and government have talked about how the U.S. can do this, that, and the other thing in order stimulate growth and build the economy.

The Republicans want to light a fire under the “lazy” unemployed people by cutting their benefits and unemployment insurance. Apparently, according to the new fiscal conservatives, unemployed people are unemployed because they aren’t looking for jobs. Apparently they aren’t looking for jobs not because the jobs don’t exist, but because they keep collecting fat paychecks from the corrupt government.

The Democrats are not quite as ridiculously off base, but they are close. They want to spend money to stimulate the economy, but they refuse to stimulate it in stimulative ways. Democrats want to offer tax breaks to working families in order to encourage more spending; all the while completely ignoring the fact that American families are saving their money, not spending it. The Democrats are scrambling left and right to find enough funding for their social programs, but they are absolutely unwilling to take apart the monstrously bloated defense budget.

The United States is essentially adrift, floating with the tide and unable to affect much positive momentum. We need to recreate or bring back millions of jobs that have been lost to outsourcing and the financial downturn. We need to spend to stimulate the economy, but if the spending isn’t efficient all it does is build upon a looming deficit disaster.

The lack of governmental continuity, and the lack of clear policy goals or objectives may be much more than a simple annoyance.

According to Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, the U.S. is adrift in a global economy that is looming on falling into depression. His June 27 piece in The New York Times highlighted just how momentous this occasion would be.

The global economy has only truly been “global” for a bit more than one century. In that century we have had two certifiable global depressions. The first came in 1873; the Long Depression (1873-1879). The second is the much more infamous Great Depression.

We tend to look back on these depression cycles as a time when the economy was falling apart left and right, and where declines were sustained and unchecked. That is not the case. Financial markets rebounded about the Panic of 1873 and the Crash of 1929, just as Wall Street has rebounded from hitting bottom in March 2009. In each case the economy began creating more jobs and GDP turned upward once again.

However, after a short period of recovery the economy relapsed.

Most Americans are familiar with the term “double-dip recession” by now, and many economists have warned that the United States is in store for a double-dip of its own. Nouriel Roubini, Pat Choate, Paul Krugman, and Joe Stiglitz, to name a few, have all warned that the last few months will have been nothing more than a short-lived spurt before yet another decline. If this happens once we call it a “double-dip.” If the pattern repeats itself over and over as the economy continues to sink it can be more accurately classified as “depression.”

Krugman’s core worry is that all of the infighting in Washington, D.C. has impaired our ability to keep from falling into a double-dip. Worse yet, the compounding failures of economic, social, military, and financial policy may be enough to turn that double-dip into a long series of gradual decline.

One of the major factors that will hold back any efforts to encourage economic growth is unemployment. There are now nearly 7 million Americans who have been officially unemployed for 27 weeks or more. Nearly half of the official unemployment figure is made up of workers who have been out of work for more than 6 months. This does not even include the millions more who have simply stopped trying, nor does it include retirees who are no longer economically productive. It also does not account for the fact that in the past decade the United States has added 30 million citizens and zero net jobs.

Regardless of how you choose to count unemployment, it is clear that the U.S. needs millions of jobs.

Republicans in Congress who were in such favor of spending for wars and tax cuts under President Bush are now born-again deficit hawks under President Obama. Even if the Democrats were able to put together an actual jobs program, instead of more useless and expensive financial stimulus, a Republican Senate filibuster would block its advance.

The two parties in power will continue to fight amongst themselves, digging the country deeper into a hole from which it must one day climb out. All the while the American people will be the ones to suffer a long and potentially devastating economic stagnation.

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