That’s how the President referred to yesterday’s unemployment release that another 263 thousand Americans lost their jobs. Since the recession began in December of 2007, over 7.2 million people have lost their jobs. Even 54 thousand government jobs disappeared last month! And, we are many months away from any good news. Unemployment improves only after the economy improves. If this is a “double-dip” recession, jobs could continue to disappear for another two years, which would be a political debacle for the current administration. Unfortunately, there is little they or anybody else can do about it.

Economists often talk about U6 unemployment, which is the number of unemployed people plus the number of people working part-time who want to work full-time, plus those people who have given up looking for work. There are now 17 million people who want to contribute to the GDP but cannot. That is a valuable national resource being wasted.