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The recession killed off 7.9 million jobs. It's increasingly likely that many will never come back.

The government jobs report issued Friday shows that businesses have slowed their pace of hiring to a relative trickle.

"The job losses during the Great Recession were so off the chart, that even though we've gained about 600,000 private sector jobs back, we've got nearly 8 million jobs to go," said Lakshman Achuthan, managing director of Economic Cycle Research Institute.

Excluding temporary Census workers, the economy has added fewer than 100,000 jobs a month this year -- a much faster and stronger jobs recovery than occurred following the last two recessions in 2001 and 1991.

But even if that pace of hiring were to double immediately, it would take until 2013 to recapture the lost jobs. And the labor market very likely doesn't have years before it gets hit with the shock of the inevitable next economic downturn.