Interesting graphs and charts department

[TheMercenary]

Let's start with the obvious: Unemployment. Three years after the financial crisis, the unemployment rate is still at the highest level since the Great Depression (except for a brief blip in the early 1980s)

Jobs are scarce, so many adults have given up looking for them. Thus, a sharp decline in the "participation ratio."

And it's not like unemployment these days is a quick, painful jolt: A record percentage of unemployed people have been unemployed for longer than 6 months.

And it's not just construction workers who can't find jobs. The median duration of all unemployment is also near an all-time high.

That 9% rate, by the way, equates to 14 million Americans—people who want to work but can't find a job.

And that's just people who meet the strict criteria for "unemployed." Include people working part-time who want to work full-time, plus some people who haven't looked for a job in a while, and unemployment's at 17%

Put differently, this is the lowest percentage of Americans with jobs since the early 1980s (And the boom prior to that, by the way, was from women entering the workforce).

Brooks: Obama Told Me "Shovel-Ready" Jobs Don't Exist Last Year