The rate of unemployment in the United States has
exceeded 8 percent since February 2009, making the past
three years the longest stretch of high unemployment in
this country since the Great Depression. Moreover, the
Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the
unemployment rate will remain above 8 percent until
2014. The official unemployment rate excludes those
individuals who would like to work but have not searched
for a job in the past four weeks as well as those who are
working part-time but would prefer full-time work; if
those people were counted among the unemployed, the
unemployment rate in January 2012 would have been
about 15 percent. Compounding the problem of high
unemployment, the share of unemployed people looking
for work for more than six months—referred to as the
long-term unemployed—topped 40 percent in December
2009 for the first time since 1948, when such data began
to be collected; it has remained above that level ever
since.