"Unemployment" in the United States

The following is a comment I made to an editorial about choosing the ideal career written by the editor, Paul-V, of the Web journal Brainshrub.

I'm sorry that I may sound like the "bitter guy" in your article but I take his position as well. There are approximately 70 million people in the U.S. who are of working age but apparently have no job. The government has these figures as well. They publish the "participation rate" which is currently less than 66% of all people between the ages 15 and 62 in the U.S. The other 33 or more percent are the real people currently unemployed in the U.S. Granted that includes a lot of teenagers that haven't families to support who shouldn't be counted to be fair. Likewise there are, lets say, 15 million housewives remaining at home taking care of their family's needs and maybe 5 million more incarcerated or in poor health. So lets just say that only 40 million are unemployed(leaving out the zillions underemployed). But the govenment keeps pretending that the unemployment rate is 5%(around 6 million)! They either claim these unaccounted-for millions are lazy or, the worst insult of all, that they have voluntarily chosen "leisure" rather than work! Like, someone having spent 8,12,or 16 years in school and shelled out perhaps $60,000 if he/she has attended college, suddenly decides "I think I'll just relax around my shack in the woods,parents house, welfare office,etc. Yea, that sounds good!". The real culprit here is the U.S. government which has continually passed laws giving away American jobs(NAFTA,CAFTA, the legal immigrant IT giveaway)to say nothing about their sitting around mute while millions of manufacturing jobs disappeared overseas. They have suceeded superbly in turning tens of millions of American citizens into the indigent unemployed! But simultaneously they exhort the public to retrain themselves(for the same jobs they have given away). This pretence is indeed obscene.