Real Numbers For A Country In Dire Need Of At Least One Dose Of Reality

It would be great big fresh catch of Lake Superior whitefish if the recent numbers on the unemployment crisis in America were even partly right.

While some celebrated an unemployment rate of "only" 8.6 percent, half that change was explained by the fact that 315,000 people dropped out of the labor force. Job creation barely kept pace with the entry of new people into the workforce.

Those 315,000 people join the 5.7 million people officially classified as long-term unemployed. That number is at historically high levels, representing nearly half (43 percent) of all the jobless people in this country.

It's not that they don't want jobs. Most of them have fallen into despair. Even worse, what they may have fallen into is realism. Unless we use the power of government to do something, some of them will never work again. They're falling out of the "normal" economy and into a new reality of persistent joblessness and, for some, eventual poverty.

& then there are the following:

Invisible: Segregation on the unemployment line. 
Invisible: The jobless generation.
Invisible: The under-employed.
Invisible: The vanishing public servant.
Invisible: The drowning middle class.