CBS News has a helpful reminder this morning: The real unemployment rate actually stands at 17%.

The national unemployment rate of about nine and a half percent sounds incredibly high and of course it is. But it doesn’t nearly capture the depth of the trouble. It doesn’t count the people who’ve seen their hours cut to part time. It doesn’t count the people who have quit looking for work.

If you add all of that together, the unemployed and the underemployed, it’s not nine and a half percent, it’s 17 percent; and in California it’s 22 percent.

And what makes it so much worse is that, nationwide, one third of the unemployed have been out of work more than a year. That hasn’t happened since the Depression.

Via HAH.