Left I on the News

Everyone saw, I'm sure, that the official U.S. unemployment rate today went over 10%, with the increasingly-acknowledged "real" unemployment rate, which includes the underemployed and those who have given up looking for work, at 17.5% (and even that, as I recall, doesn't include many others, including prisoners). But as scary as those statistics are, there's this one: the average length without a job is now 26.9 weeks - nearly seven months. And make sure to note two things. First, that's the average, which means there are many, many people who have been unemployed for much longer than that. And second, that's the average among the "officially" unemployed (the 10.2%). Just imagine how much higher that number it would be if it included all the unemployed.