Politics

The 1 Big Jobs Statistic Obama Didn't Mention

America has made gains in most economic metrics to recover from the financial crash. But the percentage of long-term unemployed workers remains high.

The 1 Big Jobs Statistic Obama Didn't Mention
SMS

The president paints a rosy economic picture, and in many ways, he's right to do that. The stock market is up and unemployment is down — at its lowest level since before the financial crash. But there's another important metric that's often overlooked.

That's long-term unemployment. The percentage of the unemployed who've been jobless for 27 weeks or longer is way up. That's bad both for those unemployed workers and for the economy as a whole, but it's rarely talked about.