The president paints a rosy economic picture, and in many ways, he's right to do that. The stock market is up and unemployment is down — at its lowest level since before the financial crash. But there's another important metric that's often overlooked.
That's long-term unemployment. The percentage of the unemployed who've been jobless for 27 weeks or longer is way up. That's bad both for those unemployed workers and for the economy as a whole, but it's rarely talked about.