Jobless in America: Is Double-Digit Unemployment Here to Stay?

With nearly 10% of Americans idled, the country faces the prospect of long-term, double-digit unemployment. Even after growth returns, many jobs won't — which is why it's time for bolder action. How to get America working again

Zach Wolfe and Jonathan Sprague / Redux for Time

Coping with bills due, dreams deferred and the need to plot a new life.

It was not a lesson Lawrence Summers mastered with great ease. But after nearly a decade working beside sphinxlike Alan Greenspan, and having watched his own tenure as president of Harvard cut short by a phrase that slipped too nimbly from brain to mouth, Summers, director of the President's National Economic Council, has become a restrained public man. Gone are the days when he would glibly compare flailing financial markets to jet crashes, as he did to TIME in 1999. He is mindful of how ill-considered asides by policymakers can cause financial-market angina. So you can probably imagine the ripple that...

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