They (the government) have trained us to look at the unemployment figures and look no further. The press, I think does only a mediocre job of looking further, and usually only hints that, "Well, it could be actually higher"..
I like this chart. In a country now with about 311 million people, a guess would be that 150 million jobs are needed. But, really, all you can do is make an educated guess. Some families are large, some small, some need two jobs; some one; some, no job at all.
In 2000, there were 275 million people and 132 million jobs, and that year things were pretty good, so that's where my 150 million figure comes from for 311 million people.
The bottom line is,
we are 18 million jobs short of making the country re-enter the land of annual pay raises and spare cash for the majority.
They would rather you did not realize that.
