No jobs, no jobs, no jobs.

As new claims for unemployment once again exceeded 400,000, the level economists consider too high to sustain job growth, the financial press more positively reported the applications “fell by 44,000 last week to 434,000, partly reversing a large spike earlier in April.”

Actually, the news is all bad. The claims figure exceeded the 428,000 applications experts had anticipated. The previous week’s figure was revised upward to 478,000. The average of new claims over the past four weeks rose by 4,500 to 436,750, the highest level since November. And the four-week average is considered the more accurate gauge, because it lessens week-to-week volatility.

Two different commentators spoke in the starkest possible terms about how truly awful the American unemployment picture looks today. Mohamed A. El-Erian (picture) is CEO of the major bond investment firm PIMCO. He wrote:

facts speak to an unpleasant and unusual reality for the United States. The country now has an unemployment problem that is large in magnitude and increasingly structural in nature. The consequences are multifaceted, involving immediate personal anguish, rising social and political tensions, economic losses, and budgetary pressures. . . High and intractable unemployment has serious negative long-term consequences that threaten to become exponentially worse. This is a crisis. [emphasis added]

And the New York Times’ David Brooks, appropriately zeroing in on the more serious male unemployment problem, similarly warned:

One-fifth of all men in their prime working ages are not getting up and going to work. . . There are probably more idle men now than at any time since the Great Depression, and this time the problem is mostly structural, not cyclical. These men will find it hard to attract spouses. Many will pick up habits that have a corrosive cultural influence on those around them. The country will not benefit from their potential abilities. This is a big problem. [emphasis added]

Both El-Erian and Brooks recommend job training and other government-run programs. Better the choices of Edward Lazear, Bush’s last chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, currently a professor at Stanford Business School, and a Hoover Institution fellow.

The prescription for the American labor market is simple: low taxes on capital investment, avoidance of excessively burdensome regulation, and open markets here and abroad. We must create a climate in which investment is profitable, productivity is rising, and employers find it profitable to increase their hiring rate.