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I have met many people in academia or applying to get in who have been profoundly ignorant about the status of the job market. There's also dozens of essays out there by people who say that they didn't know, which you can easily find. And many of the people who claim to know reflect a pre-2008 understanding. Before the financial crisis, it was really, really bad. People wrote pieces declaring the death of the humanities, etc etc. Then, afterwards, the numbers were cut in half. A lot of people seem to understand the old "this is bad" numbers but not the new "this is so much worse" numbers. And this is to say nothing of the potential for people to say they know but assume that they will be the exception rather than part of the rule.
 
What I don't understand is, if everybody knows this information, why do so many people flip out when it's brought up? If everybody is being coolly rational and informed about this, why the heat and anger when the very words "job market" appear on this board? That, I don't understand. If you're all informed, that's great. But we have every reason to believe that there are people who aren't informed, and that's who threads like this are for. If you're not one of them, just move on. Don't click the thread again. I don't understand why people can't accept the fact that some people aren't really aware and may need to hear this. It's not an insult to you if you're one of the ones who do know. When you flip out about people pointing out facts that you acknowledge are facts, it suggests that you haven't 100% come to terms with all this.

Not making money or paying into social security for 5-10+ years while your debt either increases or simply sits and gains interest is not something to turn your nose at and is the most immediate consideration to make when we go into the process that is graduate education. 
 
For me, I had a few first demands knowing the financial non-wisdom of the mere undertaking of the PhD:
-Must be funded with all tuition and major fees waived along with a stipend that provides a livable wage in the school's home market without making unreasonable work demands (20 hour TAships can explode into larger commitments). 
-On that note, no new debt. 
-School has to be very well-esteemed within its field. Placement rates have to be very good and given to me in non-anecdotal terms. It is not a time to adjust my standards, knowing the job market that awaits me. With that said, the following also matters (but cannot overrule this rule)
-Grad school has to be a positive experience. Knowing the bleakness and uncertainty of the future and the potential colossal waste of time (in financial terms) that grad school is, I have to be getting all kinds of intellectual and other kinds of gratification from the experience. There is no use trudging my way through grad school to get to an end where employment is uncertain. 
-No big commitments unless someone else (spouse) is paying for it: house purchase, baby, new car, things like that.
-Grad school can't take forever. If it is looking like an 8 year commitment, I'm getting the hell out. It isn't worth waiting that long unless there is a specific reason that involves me earning enough money to live on before and after defending the dissertation.
 
Assuming all of that goes well, I could still see a totally bleak job market. In that case, I will briefly consider non-ideal contingent positions. However, there seems to be a prevailing thought that non-TT jobs are great with the exception of the job security. That is not usually the case. Usually pay is very low, class loads are very high, and the adjunct is a clear second-class citizen within the department. I will not spend a whole lot of time under those conditions before I seek new kinds of work that will be more gratifying in all ways.
 
Also - I think the biggest issue is the sunk cost fallacy. Entering grad school or entering the job market are not so bad in and of themselves, it is the sticking with it despite clearly awful life/work conditions that is the problem. I'm happy to go to grad school, but I refuse to hate doing it. I will also refuse to spend my time working in academia (if that happens) hating my job. There is an extent to which you take some adversity for the long term good, but there are limits, especially when the long term good outcome often doesn't exist.

p.s. if you want to get a sense of what the job market is today, here is where most US jobs get posted:
 
http://academicjobs.wikia.com/wiki/English_Literature_2013-14
 
Keep in mind that some subfields will have much bigger applicant pools than others.

The most important question, I think, you should be asking yourself in this season of acceptances is if you should go to grad school at all.  If you are in the humanities or certain fields of the social sciences, the job market is very bleak.  It may well be better when you graduate, but it may well not be.  There are troubling trends like MOOCs that, many people think, will  restructure much of education in a way that will reduce the number of tenure track hires.
 
How bad is the job market currently?  According to Harvard, as of the fall of 2012, only 52% of those who got a Harvard PhD in the humanities from 2006-2011 had an academic job.  (And it looks like, based on some other data they report elsewhere, that about 1/3 of those are in non-tenure-track positions.)  23% were "unemployed and searching."  And due to self selection bias in reporting, this data probably underestimates the number of unployed.  http://history.fas.h...s-2006-2011.pdf. 
 
Because of the job market, many people from elite programs in the humanities, for instance, spend several years after graduating twisting in the wind with low-paid, time-consuming, and short-term lectureships and visiting assistant professorsips before either get a tt job or quitting academia.  If you are really committed to an academic career, you may well be signing up for a PhD + several years of uncertainty and scrapping by after that.
 
Of course not all fields and subfields are made the same.  Some of your fields will have excellent job prospects; others, terrible.  It behooves you to research the matter and think about the kind of bet your are making.  You are giving up 5-8 years of pay, and more importantly, 5-8 years in which you could be launching a different career.  When you graduate at age 30 with a PhD, you will have opened a few doors (for instance, you are an attractive hire for a private high school), but shut many more.
 
I am not saying you should not go.  Personally, I have found getting a PhD immensley rewarding.  But it has also come at a great cost.