“If we don’t get this unemployment rate down, eventually it’s going to stick,” former chairwoman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors Christina Romer warned on Monday’s show. “We’re going to have discouraged workers, people who have lost many skills. They may have a higher unemployment rate forever after, and that would be a true disaster.” With national unemployment at over 8.8 percent, there is a fear that the United States could be on the brink of a “new normal” when it comes to the number of citizens we employ. For a personal look at the nation’s economic situation we speak with former US Steel worker Ralph Kaiser, who joins us from his home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Ralph lived through the massive loss of manufacturing jobs that reshaped his city in the 1970s and contributed to the formation of the American Rust Belt.