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When large numbers of men are unable to find work, unemployment results.

Even when America's economy has been by all measures healthy and the unemployment rate low, some businesses suffer or fail and lay off workers. But nearly always, a simultaneous and even greater burst of new jobs has been created to offset the jobs lost - millions of new jobs every year.

The shock of unemployment becomes a pathology in its own right.

Prolonged unemployment is a tragedy of broken lives, broken families, foreclosed homes, and life without health insurance.

Long-term unemployment can make any worker progressively less employable, even after the economy strengthens.

In addition to joblessness, of course, by the working of supply and demand, when you have a larger number of people unemployed, wages do not rise at the normal level, so that we had last year a drop in real wages.

More people on unemployment benefits is not success in America, fewer people on not because we kicked them off but because they have been able to get a job in the private sector, because government got out of the way.

Being out of a job can erode people's confidence and their sense of possibility; and employers, often unfairly, tend to take long-term unemployment as a signal that something is wrong.

The longer people are unemployed, the less employable they become. Skills become rusty; managers look more suspiciously at someone who has been out of work for years than a candidate already employed.

Unemployment is 'involuntary' when the price is above its market clearing level. Workers are unemployed because jobs are not available at the prevailing wages, period. The only recourse is to either expand the number of jobs or somehow lower the wage.