“The State of the Union address is Obama’s opportunity to suggest some practical compromises on immigration, gun control, debt-reduction, and other topics,” said University of Virginia political expert Larry Sabato. “Certainly, he won’t want to negotiate with himself, but a president can send signals by what he mentions and doesn’t mention, what he puts first in a list of possible reforms, and even the words he stresses as he delivers the speech.”
But what if Obama jettisoned this predictable script and jarred the nation with a deadly serious conversation about the administration’s unfinished business—creating jobs?
The [State of the Union] should focus on how best to get the nation back on a path to full employment,” says Henry Aaron, an economist with the Brookings Institution. “This is today’s problem. The waste of potential output, currently running at roughly $1 trillion a year, is bad enough. The erosion of human capital of the millions of long-term unemployed and the blighted careers of the millions of young labor force entrants are even worse, injuries from which the nation will suffer for decades in lost potential output even after full employment is restored.”
Unemployment remains at a historically high 7.9 percent. The economy has shed 5.9 million full-time jobs since the start of the Great Recession at the end of 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even after more than four years of recovery, the equivalent of Los Angeles and Houston’s combined populations cannot find a 35-hour a week gig.
Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor from
Job Market Monitor 
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