Chart of the Day: Still Not Enough Jobs

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This Economic Policy Institute (EPI) chart puts a damper on all the good cheer about the economy: according to the new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of new job openings plummeted by 63,000 last November, while some 13.3 million people remained without work. That gave us a ratio of jobless people to job openings of 4.2-to-1, a slight uptick from October’s 4.3-to-1:

Here’s EPI’s Heidi Shierholz:

While the job-seekers ratio has slowly been improving since it peaked at 6.9-to-1 in the summer of 2009, today’s data release marks two years and 11 months—152 weeks—that the ratio has been above 4-to-1. A job-seekers ratio of more than 4-to-1 means that there are no jobs for more than three out of four unemployed workers, no matter what job seekers do.

The upshot: although things are certainly getting better, the economy simply hasn’t picked up enough steam to accomodate the number of people still searching for work.

So the next time someone claims that laziness, drug abuse, or a lack of education are at the root of the economy’s ills, show them this chart!

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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