Bob Herbert and The New York Times

Bob Herbert is my favorite columnist. You can read him every Tuesday and Saturday in The New York Times. Or should I say “on” The New York Times? His column today is called, “Does Obama Get It?“  The column is about the huge unemployment problem in the United States.

After I read the column I commented the following: Bob, Thanks for another great column. It seems extremely stupid to me that they don’t count unemployed people who are so discouraged that they stop looking for work. When an individual becomes unemployed, they are no longer making deposits into their Social Security account. That is what should be tracked.

Unless the person has retired, and that should be easy enough to figure out based on their age and whether or not they are collecting unemployment from a state, they should be counted in the unemployment figure. I’m sure that computers could track that quite easily.

The federal government bailed out Wall Street and the banks. They didn’t help the average citizen. Another jobless recovery in this country is going to be very ugly for a lot of people.

Where are the green jobs and when are we going to start rebuilding our infrastructure? Perhaps the president should read, “Freedom From Fear” by David M. Kennedy. (end of my comment) We need to bring counting the unemployed into the twenty first century.

“Freedom From Fear, The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945″ was published in 1999 by the Oxford University Press.

Bob Herbert’s September 15, 2009 column is titled, “A World of Hurt.” In it he says, “This recession, a full-blown economic horror, has left a gaping hole in the heart of working America that is unlikely to heal for years, if not decades.” It is another great column that is well worth reading.

If you click on his name under the title of the column, you will see a brief biography and a list of the columns he has written over the past several years.

If you haven’t discovered Bob Herbert yet, I’m glad that I can introduce you to him.