BAD NEWS FOR WHOEVER WINS IN NOVEMBER: Predictions of a several-year-long pay slump.

UPDATE: But at least consumer prices stayed flat.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Brian Leone emails:

A thought hit me this morning as I drove by the Home Depot and noticed the lack of a crowd of immigrant workers who in years past would have been gathered for hire as construction laborers by the day or piece.

The thought is: Isn’t unemployment as a function of “lost jobs” really higher than we appreciate? A huge segment of the construction field was staffed with illegal immigrant labor which, reportedly, has to a significant extent matriculated back to their nation of origin with the loss of the jobs or otherwise falls outside of statistical counting for our economic reporting.

Had these all been American workers who did not depart back to their nations of origin or fail to be counted as employees in the first place, what would the official unemployment rate be right now?

Hmm. So are these illegal immigrants serving as a sort of unemployment shock absorber? Or did their cheap labor make the housing bubble possible to begin with? Or both?