And Still We Ask: Where Are the Jobs?

It has been almost a year now since I wrote my first little post here in my own corner of the toobz. In my first few posts (here, here, here, and here), I concentrated primarily on discussing my professional skills as well as the holes in my skill set. I also tried to discuss the perspective of being one of the long term under-employed and how it can have a day-to-day impact on the individual.

Since those first few posts, I have concentrated more on the overall economic news each week and month, moving away from the strict concentration on my own situation. After all, I do recognize that no matter how wonderful an individual and how very interesting I may be, my story alone is not going to make much of a dent in the fog that surrounds the Beltway and the word clouds spouted by the Village Idiots Pundits. The reality is, while the "official" unemployment rate is at 8.8%, the rate for the un and underemployed is showing as 15.7% (U3 and U6 from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) and I am convinced that both of these numbers are artificially low.

What I have also attempted to do is point out the holes in the cheerleading. One of the items I have gotten used to tracking is the Initial Unemployment Claims filed each week that is usually released on Thursdays for the previous week. This past week (from Reuters) showed: