how unemployed are we?

it's hard, as I am on the bus looking at a truly golden gate, with a gold orange wash on the bridge that shares its name, to focus on something considerably more ugly.

but my new favorite econ/market blogger barry ritholtz nailed this one.

namely that since the early 1990s we've been intentionally undercounting the unemployed.

in fact, the BLS has been undercounting it for longer than that, it goes back to the first bush administration's politically motivated discounting of people who cannot find work giving up looking no longer counting as unemployed. clinton continued it. the end result is that our unemployment rate is actually more like 11% and don't even get me started on underemployment.

in an economically prosperous area such as the bay area, or the whitehouse, it's sometimes hard to realize what it means to be unemployed or underemployed and TRAPPED by it. It's especially hard for asshole movie stars in the whitehouse and the evil bastards who exploit their stupidity. hopefully people will stop putting them on pedestals for really just being out of touch and manipulative and more than anything else, truly uncaring about their fellow humans.

We are really just getting close to understanding this as a nation for the first time in a generation and when it happens, it will reveal the scars from the plastic surgery past administrations have used to prop up their mismanagement of the American economy.

I posit: we are far beyond reputations; legacies will crumble.