Unemployment Wrecking Everything

The reported Unemployment rate is 7.6%, which isn't great news, but the real story is that things are much much worse than that simple number.  There are two very bad things going on in our country.

1. The duration of unemployment as published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics has risen to levels not seen in the last 65 years, it peaked at 40 weeks (about 9 months) in 2011 and has since fallen to 35 weeks (about 8 months).  By comparison, the highest levels ever seen in the worst of previous recessions peaked at about 20 weeks, and then rapidly recovered.  The length of unemployment is now twice as long as it has been since the BLS kept records.  Also since 1970, the average duration keeps going higher, reflecting that once you are unemployed, it takes longer to find another job, and it's been getting harder over the last 40 years.
2. The number of people dropping out of the labor force (who are no longer reflected in the official unemployment rate) now exceed the number who eventually find jobs as reported by the New York Times.

"Unemployed workers have been more likely to flow out of the labor force than into employment for almost the entire period beginning around December 2008 to the present. This was historically not the case; for the nearly 19 years spanning from February 1990 (when the data series began) to the end of 2008, jobless workers were almost always more likely to find a job than to give up or retire. There were only two months when this was not the case (March 2003 and December 2005).
In June, the number of people flowing from unemployment into employment (2,330,000) was almost as high as the the number flowing from unemployment out of the labor force (2,481,000)"

So if it seems that things are worse this time around, it's because they are, in fact, a lot worse.  This sounds like the Giant Sucking Sound that Ross Perot mentioned in 1992 when NAFTA was proposed.