Unemployed & Underemployed Continue to Grow : Why?

I wonder why the Bureau of Labor Statistic uses the lower unemployment number of 7.7% instead of the U6 number which places the unemployment at over 14% and growing? Maybe they are told what to tell the public and to keep the real number hidden as it will reflect poorly on the current administration policies.

Currently there are about 80 million unemployed and underemployed workers in our country, and more joining the ranks every month as they decided to leave the work force entirely finding their search for jobs is futile.

Yet the talking heads continue to profess the country is turning the corner and prosperity is here. Housing, jobs, the stock market are all looking great. The good times are here again. But what about the food stamp problem, more and more people applying for Social Security disability and the debt and deficit still rocketing skyward and the new ObamaCare mandate bringing trillions of new debt?

The clarion call for "hope and change" is failing to inspire the unemployed and destitute as it once did. Still, the move is on for more billions for 'shovel ready jobs to build roads and bridges' to spread more taxpayer dollars among the faithful until the next election in 2014 where the progressive socialists hope to win both houses of congress.

If that happens, with the socialists in charge of the entire government, then the 'hope' will be just a memory for a better life, leaving only 'change' which will once and for all be a  "fundamental" change for our country and our way of life.

I wonder who voted for this new way of life and if they still believe it is a good thing?

College Grads May Be Stuck in Low-Skill Jobs
Source: Ben Casselman, "College Grads May Be Stuck in Low-Skill Jobs," Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2013. Paul Beaudry, David A. Green and Benjamin M. Sand, "The Great Reversal in the Demand for Skill and Cognitive Tasks," National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2013.
March 28, 2013

The recession left millions of college-educated Americans working in coffee shops and retail stores. Now, new research suggests their job prospects may not improve much when the economy rebounds, says the Wall Street Journal.

Underemployment -- skilled workers doing jobs that don't require their level of education -- has been one of the hallmarks of the slow recovery. But in a paper released Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a team of Canadian economists argues that the United States faces a longer-term problem.

• They found that unlike the 1990s, when companies needed hundreds of thousands of skilled workers to develop, build and install high-tech systems, demand for such skills has fallen in recent years, even as young people continued to flock to programs that taught them.
• Paul Beaudry, an economist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and the paper's lead author, says new technologies may eventually revive demand for advanced skills, but an economic recovery alone won't be sufficient.
• Using Labor Department data, Beaudry and his coauthors found that demand for college-level occupations -- primarily managers, professionals and technical workers -- peaked as a share of the workforce in about 2000, just as the dot-com bubble was about to burst, and then began to decline.
• The supply of such workers, meanwhile, continued to grow through the 2000s.
• The subsequent housing boom helped mask the problem by creating artificially high demand for workers of all kinds, but only temporarily.

Better-educated workers still face far better job prospects than their less-educated counterparts.

• The unemployment rate for Americans with at least a bachelor's degree was 3.8 percent in February, compared with 7.9 percent for those with just a high school diploma.
• College-educated employees also tend to earn more and advance more quickly even when they are in fields that don't require a degree.

But as college-educated workers have been forced to take lower-level jobs, they have displaced less-skilled workers, leaving those without degrees with few job options. "You eventually push the lowest skilled out of the market," says Beaudry.
Source: Ben Casselman, "College Grads May Be Stuck in Low-Skill Jobs," Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2013. Paul Beaudry, David A. Green and Benjamin M. Sand, "The Great Reversal in the Demand for Skill and Cognitive Tasks," National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2013.