The Obama Administration and the rest of the country ignores so much more to our detriment around the unemployment issue. For more than 70 years, we’ve calculated unemployment merely through looking at unemployment claim and unemployment check numbers. The actual unemployment rate — all able-bodied people looking for work yet can’t find any — is close to double the official number (according to numerous studies over the past three decades).
But even more insidious is the issue of underemployment. In times of serious economic distress, many of the unemployed or those under threat of unemployment will work a part-time job or a couple of part-time jobs to maintain some level of financial and economic subsistence. This is a murkier thing to calculate (and only been calculated since 1994), considering how many of us may be willing to work part-time for a period of our careers. But there’s also the reality that most of us, if given a choice between full-time work and underemployment, will choose the full employment.
Even with this, the Labor Department and the Gallup folks have underemployment between 16 and 20 percent, which explains why there are so many able-bodied adults with time on their hands. At least 40 million people without full-time work. It’s a shame, it’s pitiful, and its’ scary that no one in Washington really cares or can do anything about it.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Notes from a Boy @ The Window 
I’ve been really disappointed in Obama’s economic/education response. Instead of creating the misguided “Race to the Top” policy horror, Obama had a golden opportunity to focus on the infrastructure of public schools. In 1996, the GAO released a study that documented the sorry state of public school buildings. At that time, the GAO projected that it would take at least $600 billion (yes, billion) dollars to bring every US public school up to building code.
So, a major infrastructure project would have brought our schools up to building code AND employed millions of people (perhaps a la WPA). It was a tremendous two-fer that was ignored. Who cares if, in some states, a 100 Ronald Reagan High Schools would bloom? There are real physical plant needs out there.
It’s why I really wonder about Obama and the unemployed. I fear he cares far more about Wall Street than Main Street, much less the Back Streets.
“And the hits don’t stop ’til we get to the top,” to quote Casey Kasem from his Billboard Top 40 countdown days. Especially when it comes to the Obama Administration on economic and education issues. People keep comparing his decision making to the Bushes (I and II), but I think a fairer comparison is to Clinton. At least, minus the smoothness. There are many problems that Obama could but doesn’t address because moneyed interests have more control over his ability to govern and win re-election than the millions of people he could put back to work modernizing America’s schools, building bridges, renovating our sewer and waterlines and repaving roads. The real shame of it is that there are millions of Americans who do not understand, and more importantly, don’t care to understand how we’ve pretty much lost the class war and how much power’s in the hands of banks and corporations. At least, those of us who haven’t lost their homes or declared bankruptcy since 2008.