With the nation’s unemployment rate at 7.6 percent, members of Congress are fond of saying that they are focused on nothing but jobs. And yet, when Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D) scheduled a Joint Economic Committee hearing on one of the biggest jobs-related crises facing the United States, just four of the committee’s 20 members bothered to show up.

When Klobuchar’s hearing on long-term unemployment began at 10:30 Wednesday morning, she was the only member in attendance. She was later joined by three other members, though not a single one of the committee’s 10 Republican members managed to attend, as National Journal’s Niraj Chokshi reports:

The Joint Economic Commitee is one of a handful of committees whose members come from both parties and both houses of Congress. Klobuchar was eventually joined by three colleagues (in order of their appearance): Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, Maryland Rep. John Delaney and Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings. All four are Democrats.

As Chokshi noted, it’s not uncommon for lawmakers to be absent at the beginning of hearings, and there were 25 others going on simultaneously at the time. But perhaps the poor attendance at a hearing dealing with unemployment shouldn’t be a surprise, given the general lack of focus from members of Congress on unemployment since the end of the recession. Instead, Congress has focused on debt and deficits, cutting spending even when evidence shows that the opposite needs to be done to grow the economy and create jobs.

There are currently 4.7 million American workers who have been unemployed for at least six months, and the challenges they face are immense. Not only do they long-term unemployed face discriminatory hiring policies that make it nearly impossible for them to find work, they are also losing federal unemployment insurance thanks to state-level cuts and sequestration, which slashed 10 percent from federal benefits.

Unfortunately, even if they had attended, it’s unlikely members of Congress would have gotten the complete picture of unemployment they needed. All four of the panelists invited to speak were white men, the least likely to be affected by the long-term unemployment crisis. A report that accompanied the hearing, in fact, noted that even as long-term unemployment rates have fallen for blacks and Latinos, “progress has been slower than for other racial and ethnic groups.”

The federal government’s long-term unemployment insurance program, which became law shortly before the Great Recession began driving the nation’s unemployment rate through the roof, is already facing cuts thanks to the automatic budget cuts that began taking effect on March 1. Sequestration will force 10.7 percent cuts to all benefit checks, costing recipients as much as $450 out of their already-modest benefits before the end of the fiscal year.

Now, though, some states are considering whacking their long-term unemployment insurance programs altogether, since figuring out how to administer the cuts to a program that is run jointly between federal and state governments may prove too complicated. In congressional testimony Tuesday, an official told members of Congress that 11 states may drop their long-term programs to comply with Department of Labor standards, the Huffington Post’s Arthur Delaney reports:

Rich Hobbie, director of the National Association of State Workforce Agencies, said in written testimony during a congressional hearing on Tuesday that workforce agencies are in close communication with the U.S. Department of Labor about sequestration and that 11 might drop the compensation to comply.

“Eleven states are exploring terminating the [Emergency Unemployment Compensation] agreement with USDOL as an implementation option,” Hobbie said.

Eight states have already made substantial cuts to their unemployment insurance programs this year, which has reduced benefits for the long-term unemployed since the federal Emergency Unemployment Compensation program is tied to the limits and restrictions of state programs. It is unclear which 11 states are considering eliminating their programs outright, though Indiana tried earlier this year before the Labor Dept. gave it more time to comply.

The average length of unemployment is 35 weeks, above the general 26-week threshold for being considered “long-term unemployed.” And while budget cuts are making it harder for those workers to receive modest benefits to keep getting by, discrimination is making it nearly impossible for them to return to work, as a recent study showed that even with experience, workers who have been off the job for more than six months have significantly lower call-back rates than those who have been out of work for less time.

There was a period when the U.S. looked like it might avoid the mistakes of some of its European counterparts, who rushed to austerity and have found themselves saddled with stagnant growth. But the U.S. has gotten into the austerity game, most recently with the implementation of sequestration’s across-the-board spending cuts.

And just like its austere European neighbors, the U.K. in particular, it’s now getting a warning from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In its latest report, the biannual World Economic Outlook, the New York Times reports that the organization had some stern words for those who think cutting government spending in the middle of a sluggish recovery is a good idea:

The fund lowered its estimate of United States growth this year to 1.9 percent, down 0.2 percentage point from its January forecast. While Washington had avoided falling over the “fiscal cliff,” the I.M.F. said that the United States had proved too aggressive in carrying out budget cuts, given its still-sluggish rates of growth and high unemployment levels. It said it anticipated that the across-the-board $85 billion in budget cuts known as sequestration would push down growth levels this year and beyond.

“The growth figure for the United States for 2013 may not seem very high, and indeed it is insufficient to make a large dent in the still-high unemployment rate,” Olivier Blanchard, the fund’s chief economist, said in the report. “But it will be achieved in the face of a very strong, indeed overly strong, fiscal consolidation of about 1.8 percent of G.D.P. Underlying private demand is actually strong, spurred in part by the anticipation of low policy rates under the Federal Reserve’s ‘forward guidance’ and by pent-up demand for housing and durables.”

The fund also lowered its projection of global growth to about 3.3 percent this year, a 0.2 percentage point reduction. And it didn’t just dole out harsh words for the U.S.: It lowered its forecasts for U.K. growth by 0.3 percentage points for this year and next, citing slashed spending.

Sequestration is already hurting the U.S. economy, but it’s not the only austerity measure that’s causing pain. Government spending overall has been lower during Obama’s administration than any point since the Eisenhower era. This is at a time of miserably high unemployment and incredibly low interest rates on U.S. borrowing. The U.S. could instead be spending money to rebuild crumbling infrastructure and put people back to work.

This past Friday, the Atlantic’s Matthew O’Brien dug up a study by Northeastern University which found that, after submitting an application for a job, a person’s chances of being called back for an interview completely collapse if they’ve been out of work for more than six months.

Researcher Rand Ghayad sent out 3,600 fake resumes to 600 job openings. He held constant the gender, educational background, and the racial ambiguity of the names of the fake applicants. But he mixed up how long the fake applicants had been out of work, how often they’d switched jobs, and whether they had any industry experience. In a result O’Brien understandably characterized as “terrifying,” the length of unemployment completely overwhelmed the other two variables as an influencing factor on who got a call back:

As long as you’ve been out of work for less than six months, you can get called back even if you don’t have experience. But after you’ve been out of work for six months, it doesn’t matter what experience you have. Quite literally. There’s only a 2.12 percentage point difference in callback rates for the long-term unemployed with or without industry experience. That’s compared to a 7.13 and 8.95 percentage point difference for the short-and-medium-term unemployed.

There was no similar drop-off for how often a worker had switched jobs in the past. Fake applicants who’d gone through five to six jobs but had experience in the relevant industry were still over 7 percent more likely to get a call back than those without experience. And the latter’s chances were roughly equal to someone who’d only held one or two jobs but lacked relevant experience.

O’Brien recommends that the government start targeting the long-term unemployed for hiring. (The long-term unemployment problem following the Great Depression, for example, arguably wasn’t solved until the mass government-hiring program otherwise known as World War II.) That’s further than any lawmakers have yet proposed going, but in 2011 President Obama and the Democrats tried to something about this exact problem. Their $447 billion American Jobs Act included a tax credit worth up to $4,000 a piece for any firm that hired someone who’d been out of work longer than six months.

The legislation was, of course, filibustered to death by Senate Republicans.

At that point, 6.2 million people were in the ranks of the long-term unemployed, and the number was still over 5 million as September 2012. No small part of that decrease is due to people giving up on finding work entirely, and thus no longer showing up as part of the labor force. The longer these Americans have to go without the chance to work, the more damage is done to their own individual ability to flourish, and thus to the long-term health of the economy as a whole.

The Washington Post flagged a new study today from a Dartmouth professor and co-authors, which found that high unemployment causes much more misery for the average person than high inflation. That’s significant, in a really discouraging way, because American policy over the last few decades — and especially since the Great Recession — has focused overwhelmingly on keeping inflation low.

The research used several different surveys of well-being and self-reported happiness — cross-referenced with other measures to try to control for the inherent subjectivity — done across both the United States and Europe since the 1970s. This sort of research certainly isn’t the end-all measurement of the effects of economic policy, but well-being and happiness research are relatively well-developed now. They’re worth taking seriously “as a complement to standard approaches,” as the authors put it.

At any rate, when they broke down the numbers for periods of high inflation and high unemployment, and how the two interact, the researchers found human beings are hurt far more by unemployment than inflation:

We estimate the unemployment/inflation trade-off as approximately 3.8. That is to say a one percentage point increase in unemployment lowers well-being nearly four times more than an equivalent rise in inflation. Excluding the five main euro area countries that are especially worried about inflation — Germany, Austria, France, Finland and Austria — the elasticity rises to over six times.

A big reason for this, as the Washington Post sums it up, is that unemployment not only effects people who lost their jobs, “it also generates fear among that person’s family, friends and neighbors over their own job security. The unemployed person may also turn to them for financial or other help, further affecting their well-being.” Meanwhile, inflation is a rise in the general level of prices in the economy — which includes labor more than anything else — so it can’t push up the cost of goods and services without also pushing up incomes. In fact, the single biggest cause of inflation is upward pressure put on consumer prices by growing wages. So there’s a largely unavoidable trade-off between controlling inflation and growing the economy.

Unfortunately, over the last few decades, and especially since the 2008 collapse, the United States has done a much better job minimizing inflation then maximizing employment:

We’ve been consistently hitting our two percent inflation target, even though unemployment remains over seven percent, and an inflation level of three or even four percent is perfectly compatible with (perhaps even better for) a robustly growing economy.

There are several reasons for this imbalance. The Federal Reserve — which controls interest rates and the money supply, and is tasked with the dual mandate to control inflation and boost employment — is intertangled with the banking and financial industry, which has much more interest in lowering inflation. Republicans have also brought a lot of pressure to bear on the Fed to fight inflation, with no serious opposing push-back to prioritize employment. Finally, the decades-long drive to stabilize inflation at two percent has arguably gotten the economy into a rut; it’s now more difficult for job growth to rebound from a recession, and the Fed itself is left with fewer tools to help.

Young Americans make up nearly half of America’s unemployed workforce, according to a study released Thursday, and the unemployment rate for Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 is a staggering 15.1 percent. But the bleak job prospects for young Americans isn’t just contributing to the nation’s persistently high unemployment rate. According to a study from the Center for American Progress, the long-term effects will hurt young Americans for years to come.

The negative effects of unemployment, in fact, will cost young Americans more than $20 billion over the next decade, CAP’s Sarah Ayres found:

Not only is unemployment bad for young people now, but the negative effects of being unemployed have also been shown to follow a person throughout his or her career. A young person who has been unemployed for six months can expect to earn about $22,000 less over the next 10 years than they could have expected to earn had they not experienced a lengthy period of unemployment. In April 2010 the number of people ages 20–24 who were unemployed for more than six months had reached an all-time high of 967,000 people. We estimate that these young Americans will lose a total of $21.4 billion in earnings over the next 10 years.

It isn’t just unemployment that is depressing wages for young workers, though. College graduates and young workers are increasingly being pushed in to low-wage jobs as better opportunities aren’t available to them because of a slacking job market. Low-wage jobs have made up a majority of the jobs added since the end of the recession, and there are now 13.4 million college graduates occupying them — a 19 percent increase since the start of the recession.

These losses also hurt the broader economy, as young Americans are less able to spend money. Reports have already shown that unemployment for young Americans is holding back the housing recovery and thus the overall economic recovery, and other reports paint an even worse picture. As Ayres noted, this unemployment will cost young Americans $1.6 trillion over their lifetimes, which will also reduce revenues for the federal government.

But even as youth unemployment remains in crisis, the government has cut more than $1 billion from youth job programs and continues to focus on reducing the deficit instead of policies that will create jobs and help young Americans — and the country as a whole — finally recover from the Great Recession.

The 5.6 million young adults who are willing and able to work but cannot find a job make up 45 percent of America’s unemployed workforce, while another 4.7 million are stuck in part-time jobs when they are seeking full-time employment, according to a new report from Demos. In total, the U.S. needs to add 4.1 million jobs for young workers — ages 18 to 34 — to return to pre-recession levels of employment.

While unemployment for ages 18-to-34 is high, it is especially high for workers on the bottom half of that range, as this chart from the Demos report shows:

Unemployment is also worse for minority youths — particularly blacks and Latinos — and for young people without a college education. While the unemployment rate is low for young workers with a college degree — 7.7 percent for ages 18-to-24 and 5.1 percent for ages 25-to-34 — it is 10 percent for workers with only a high school diploma and 16.5 percent for workers with less education than that.

Worse, young workers are increasingly employed in low-wage sectors. More than 40 percent of workers between ages 18 and 24 work in either retail or food services, both of which are among the lowest-paying sectors in the American economy. College graduates, as recent Labor Department data showed, are increasingly working in low-wage jobs, largely because they have made up a majority of jobs added since the recession ended. One of every four Americans is projected to be working in a low-wage job in a decade.

For young workers, however, the effects can be worse both for them and the overall economy. Not only do low wages and unemployment hold young workers back economically for the rest of their lives, it also has hurt the housing market and the economic recovery. Still, lawmakers in Washington remain committed to focusing on deficit reduction the country doesn’t need instead of the jobs crisis that is hurting workers and putting a chill on both short- and long-term economic growth.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, expanded rapidly during the Great Recession, when millions of workers lost jobs and entered poverty, forcing them to turn to the government’s social safety net for help. But even as the economy has begun to recover, SNAP “isn’t shrinking back alongside the recovery,” the Wall Street Journal warned today.

States and the federal government both expanded SNAP access before and during the recession in an attempt to extend more aid to struggling Americans. That has led Republicans like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) aching to cut the supposedly “unsustainable” program, since its costs and enrollment are both at record levels. In the piece, the Journal admits that “the biggest factor behind the upward march of food stamps is a sluggish job market and a rising poverty rate,” but it then asks whether those expansions have made the program far more costly over the long-run and wonders why SNAP enrollment hasn’t dropped along with unemployment rates:

The food-stamp rolls have swollen since 2008 and are projected to stay that way for years. In 2008, SNAP enrollment was 28.2 million. Unemployment peaked in October 2009 at 10% and was at 7.7% as of February, but SNAP kept growing.

The Congressional Budget Office predicts unemployment will drop to 5.6% by 2017 but that SNAP enrollment will drop slightly to 43.3 million people, down 4.5 million from the current level.

That makes it very different from the other big federal support program, unemployment insurance, which shrinks as the economy improves. Continued jobless claims dropped to 3.1 million in February after peaking at 6.6 million in May 2009.

Unemployment insurance enrollment has dropped because it is based on unemployment. SNAP, however, is based on income, which is why it tracks not with the unemployment rate but with poverty levels, as this chart from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows:

That SNAP isn’t shrinking at the same rate as unemployment insurance isn’t exactly a shocking revelation, especially since 58 percent of the jobs created since the recession are in low-wage sectors that are less likely to pull workers out of poverty and off of food stamps. The poverty rate rose sharply after the recession, and it hasn’t dropped significantly since the recovery began. But for all the concerns about SNAP’s long-term costs, the program is projected to return to its return to its historical spending levels by 2023:

The Journal actually acknowledges that the expansions make little difference in the cost of the program, but not until the second-to-last paragraph. “The Congressional Budget Office said reinstating eligibility limits would save around $4.5 billion over 10 years, a fraction of the program’s total cost over that time,” it writes there, all but admitting that the reason SNAP expanded is not because the government made it easier to enroll but because the economy contracted and plunged millions of people into poverty. That, in short, is exactly what the program is supposed to do.

For all the talk among conservatives about the “bloated” size of government, public sector job losses have plagued America’s economic recovery from the Great Recession. And with the automatic budget cuts that took effect on March 1 beginning to take effect, those losses are only going to make efforts to fully escape the throes of the recession even harder.

Governments at the state, local, and federal level have cut 740,000 jobs since the beginning of the recession, according to Department of Labor data. So even as the private sector has added 5.2 million jobs in that time, the public sector is still in the red, as this chart from the Wall Street Journal illustrates:

The losses that occurred at the state and local level were due to crimped budgets because of the recession, but they were exacerbated by budget cuts at the federal level too. Hundreds of thousands of teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other government workers have lost jobs as federal aid to states has been reduced and as states have cut aid to localities. The last three years were the worst on record for public sector job losses.

That will only get worse as sequestration continues to go into effect. Government agencies will begin furloughing workers at the beginning of April, and though that won’t have the same effect as all-out job losses, it will still reduce pay for those workers. Reduced aid to states and localities will mean that schools and government offices leave jobs vacant and cut existing staff. Government spending has traditionally pulled America out of economic downturns, and had it maintained its pre-recession employment level, the nation’s 7.8 percent unemployment rate would be a full point lower. Instead, budget cuts that lead to public sector job losses have only made the road to recovery longer than it should have been.

Each and every month recently has brought more miserable economic news from Europe. Today was no exception, as the latest data from Eurostat, Europe’s official statistics agency, shows that the continent broke yet another record for unemployment, as joblessness hit 11.9 percent. That translates to 19 million people out of work in the Eurozone alone (and 26 million across all of the European Union):

Unemployment in the 17-nation euro zone stood at 11.9 percent in January, up from 11.8 percent in December, and from 10.8 percent in January 2012, Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, reported from Luxembourg. [...]

European unemployment bottomed in early 2008, just as the financial crisis was getting in motion, and has been on a rising trend ever since. The January numbers were the highest since the creation of the euro.

In absolute terms, Eurostat estimated Friday, 19 million people in the euro zone and more than 26 million people in the overall European Union. were unemployed.

Here’s a chart from Lily Kuo showing the rise in European unemployment:

These numbers should show that Europe’s adherence to austerity is not working. But European Union officials have said that they will not abandon their push to slash spending as a way to turn their economy around.