One of the bedrocks of being alive and being anywhere near ‘successful,’ is having a job — working a wage.
And although job openings in the U.S. rose in March to the highest level in more than three years, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond President Jeffrey Lacker noted yesterday unemployment remains at “a very elevated rate“ and the whole process will take time — a long time.

Numbers involving employment can be way-deceiving, creating a picture that’s more Pablo Picasso than Norman Rockwell.

(Illustration found here).

Arithmetic is nowhere near my strong suit.
Bloomberg explains:

The Labor Department reported that as of April, 58.4 percent of the U.S. population was gainfully employed.
That’s down from 58.6 percent in February, and exactly where the employment-to-population ratio stood a year ago.
The decline reflects the fact that job gains aren’t keeping up with population growth.
It also demonstrates the illusory nature of April’s reduction in the unemployment rate, to 8.1 percent from 8.2 percent in March.
The Labor Department, in its monthly household survey, counts people as unemployed only if they’re in the labor force, meaning they’re actively looking for work.
In April, the estimated number of people in the labor force fell by 342,000.
So the unemployment rate fell, too, even though the survey counted 169,000 fewer people with jobs.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, there’s about 12.5 million US peoples unemployed right now with about 5.1 million of those on what’s called ‘long-term unemployment’ (27 weeks or more) and those guys are the in the pits.
Despite all that, US employers added 3.74 million job openings in March, the highest in nearly four years, to create a sense of a kind of sunshine: That means an average of 3.4 people competed for each open job. While that’s far better than the nearly 7-to-1 ratio when the recession ended. In a healthy job market, the ratio is usually around 2 to 1.
Jobs are still hard to come by and customers at the liquor store I manage are always waxing sad about finding a job — the unemployment rate up here in northern California is way above the average at about 11.3 percent, pretty heady.

Along with the precarious job market, there’s the assholes working to strip what’s left off the bones.
In the defeat yesterday of Indiana’s Dick Lugar to a Tea Party nit-twit is just another sampling of what’s in store for the job market.
GOP peoples blame the jobless for being without a job.

One asshole Tea-Bagger is Maine’s Governor, Paul LePage, who blubbered that to get these shiftless people off their asses is to gut unemployment benefits.
(Via Think Progress):

There is such thing as a free lunch, but you’re picking up the tab.
Maine’s welfare program is cannibalizing the rest of state government.
I am compassionate and committed to our children, our elderly, and our disabled.
But to all you able-bodied people out there, get off the couch and get yourself a job.

What a liar — compassionate?

Paul Krugman in his new book — “End This Depression Now!” — discusses the job market and how being employed is part and parcel of the so-called American Dream.
In an excerpt found at HuffPost, Krugman talks about working and how the GOP/Tea Party looks at the jobless, as in ‘involuntary unemployment’ and how to gaze back at them:

The classic answer to such people comes from a passage near the beginning of the novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (best known for the 1948 film adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston): “Anyone who is willing to work and is serious about it will certainly find a job. Only you must not go to the man who tells you this, for he has no job to offer and doesn’t know anyone who knows of a vacancy. This is exactly the reason why he gives you such generous advice, out of brotherly love, and to demonstrate how little he knows the world.”
Quite.
Also, about those McDonald’s applications: in April 2011, as it happens, McDonald’s did announce 50,000 new job openings.
Roughly a million people applied.

Later, he offers up this insight between the 1930s and the nowadays:

Nor is America immune.
Can anyone deny that the Republican Party has become far more extreme over the past few years?
And it has a reasonable chance of taking both Congress and the White House later this year, despite its radicalism, because extremism flourishes in an environment in which respectable voices offer no solutions as the population suffers.

Krugman paints a picture worse than we think it is, and although he claims the problems can be lessened with more cash flowing into US peoples pockets, this country is still a Tea Party world, and those with the biggest mouth, whether lying or not, still gets the most attention.

A full-time job just listening to the shit.