The unemployment situation is grim.

A couple of weeks ago Robert Reich wrote:

125,000 are needed just to keep up with the increase in the population of Americans wanting and needing work. And 300,000 a month are needed — continuously, for five years — if we’re to get back to anything like the employment we had before the Great Recession.

This is simply awful. Just awful.  I can't begin to understand how the unemployed are dealing with this situation:

• There are 7.7 million fewer payroll jobs now than before the recession started in December 2007.
• Almost 14 million Americans are unemployed.
• Of those unemployed, 6.2 million have been unemployed for six months or more.
• Another 8.4 million are working part time for economic reasons, 
• About 4 million more have left the labor force since the start of the recession (we can see this in the dramatic drop in the labor force participation rate), 
• of those who have left the labor force, about 1 million are available for work, but are discouraged and have given up.