Ken Braun: The road back from Michigan economy's 'Lost Decade' is longer than it seems

Ken Braun: The road back from Michigan economy's 'Lost Decade' is longer than it seems | MLive.com: "Michigan’s unemployment rate has begun to tick upward again. The September report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, reflecting the month of August, showed 9.0 percent - up from a recent low of 8.4 percent in April. It had been five years since Michigan unemployment dipped below 8.5 percent, so even that looked like progress.

Even if we’re doing okay, it’s going to look like this for a while. To understand why, one must really look into the deceptively deep and still underestimated crater drilled into the Michigan economy during the “Lost Decade” from 2001-2010.

The BLS numbers say nearly 5 million Michigan residents were working in March of 2000, an all-time record. It was all mostly a sharp downhill plunge from there to September 2010, when fewer than 4.2 million of us had work. The lost job tally during this run was more than 837,000. "