Working public drops from 67% to 58.4%

Begin quote:
It was 67.3 percent when George W. Bush took office in 2001, and down to 65.5 percent when President Obama took office in 2009.
The rate was all the way down to 58.4 percent in April 2011 and, after increasing slightly, returned last month again to 58.4 percent, according to the federal government.
When potential workers give up that job hunt, the official unemployment number tends to improve. This helps explain how the economy added just 115,00 jobs from March to April while the unemployment rate went from 8.2 percent to 8.1 percent. Yet over the same period, 342,000 job seekers stopped looking for work.
Throw that scenario back to early 2009, and we'd be talking about an 11.1 percent jobless rate. Reach all the way back to the employment picture for when Bush took office, and the rate would be more like 13.1 percent. end quote from

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/05/10/jobless-rate-could-be-as-high-as-111-percent/?intcmp=trending#ixzz1uXiyW3ON

So, as you can see if we take the percentage of people in the U.S. working or looking for work in 2000 and compare it to now we have to subtract 58.4% from 67.3%.  This figure is 8.9%

So, the way I would interpret this is that we have lost 8.9% of our jobs to being shipped overseas or have lost them to technology and this likely will increase as it has the last 12 years.

Unless this is addressed this figure could double to 18% or 20% in the next 10 years or so just from increasing sophistication of technology. In real terms this would mean that within 10 years only about 48% of U.S. legal residents would either be employed or looking for work. This will even happen in places like China with even more disastrous results there than here because of the exponential rise in wages there. At least here in the U.S. and Europe we have things like Human rights which might save us. A welfare state based upon technological companies no longer hiring anyone or very few might be established so the permanent poor without jobs don't go hungry or die. However, in places like China without any real human rights, starvation and death and revolution might be the result.

However, blaming this on Bush or Obama is stupid because the real cause is allowing companies to ship jobs overseas and technological exponential innovation. I don't think nation states are prepared to cope with any of this because politicians aren't addressing this in a way people can actually understand or in any useful way. The way I am presenting these facts is in a completely non-political way which might be the most pragmatically useful in these times.