A big part of the U.S. unemployment problem is a mis-match between the jobs that are available and the capabilities of the people who are unemployed. Many of the jobs that existed before the recession are gone for good and the people who held those jobs don't have the skills needed to work in other fields.
A big chunk of current unemployment is structural, not cyclical: resurgent demand won't make it go away. If the problem were a lack of demand, policies that boost demand--fiscal stimulus, aggressive monetary policy--would help. But if unemployment is mainly structural, there's little we can do about it.
There's a price to be paid for the excesses of the past decade; the U.S. economy was profoundly out of whack before the recession hit; and we need major changes in the kind of work people do. Jobs have been lost and hiring is slow almost across the board.
In addition, deflation is causing payrolls to be slashed by five percent or more; not just in the bubble categories of construction and finance but also in manufacturing, retail, wholesale, transportation, and information technology. One of the industries that has been most cautious is the hotel and leisure business because people have less money to spend on easy-to-postpone vacation travel. What has defined the recent recession was the biggest decline in consumption and investment since the Great Depression.
The structural shift in the global economy makes individual government action irrelevant because stimulating demand won't work long-term.
Source: The New Yorker, January 3, 2011