DADvocate

This wonderful article greeted me on my morning visit to CNN.com, Job gloom at all-time high.

More Americans than ever before feel they have no hope of finding a job.

A record 1.21 million people want to work, but said they aren't looking because of the weak labor market, according to federal statistics released Friday. The June figure is up from 793,000 a year ago.

The statistic is yet another sign of how bleak the employment picture is. And these folks, known as "discouraged workers," aren't even counted in the unemployment rate because they haven't looked for work in the past four weeks.

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The labor force, in general, has shrunk over the past two months, contracting by 974,000 people as they lost confidence in their employment prospects. That reverses part of the gain of 1.7 million workers in the first four months of 2010, when a wave of optimism flowed through the nation.

More people may have stopped looking for work because their jobless benefits are expiring, wrote Deutsche Bank economists Joseph LaVorgna and Carl Riccadonna in a note. To collect unemployment benefits, people must be actively seeking work.

As the labor force contracts, the unemployment rate falls. This is one reason why it dropped in June from 9.7% the month before.

"The decline in the unemployment rate is not a reflection of strength, but rather a sign of discouragement among the ranks of the unemployed," the economists said.

Emphasis added.

Got that? Just because unemployment dropped in some of the prior months, it wasn't a good sign but a sign of how bad things are. I know that several of the people laid off from my company about a year ago still haven't been able to find employment. These are college educated, computer literate, intelligent folks. Some of whom retrained for other areas.

More and more unemployed have no hope of finding a job and experts don't see things changing for the better any time soon.

How's that hope and change bullsh*it working out for you now?