One in six Americans Now Out of Work, Tech Employment Drops

This will not be news to regular readers of this site, but the number of people unemployed in the U.S. is much higher than the official rate of 9.8 percent. Discouraged workers (those who have stopped looking for jobs) number in the millions, and they are not counted among the unemployed. Additionally, no one has a handle on the extent of underemployment.

While the IT sector remains largely insulated, the IT sector an alarming 3.7 percent of its jobs in the past year, according to report released on Friday.

Over one third of jobless people is now counted among the "long-term unemployed," meaning that they have been out of work for six months or longer. Manufacturing and construction continue to leak jobs at such a rate that one has to wonder where the stimulus money went since so much of it was directed at bolstering those sectors.

When you add it all up, roughly one in six Americans (17 percent or roughly 50 million people -- twice the number as in the Great Depression) is now unable to find full-time work.

The stimulus of $350 billion should have been enough to create millions of high-paid jobs. Where are those jobs, specifically? The public has been re-assured that the money was well spent, but the numbers do not add up. $350 billion amounts to roughly the entire GDP of nations like Greece and Denmark.

Where did that money go? Something tells me that most of it ended up in the hands of the very rich.