Agreed, plus (un)employment is used as a fairly common headline statistic which strongly informs government policy. If you have 2% unemployment but 20% of the w

Agreed, plus (un)employment is used as a fairly common headline statistic which strongly informs government policy. If you have 2% unemployment but 20% of the workforce without healthcare and working multiple jobs, it's much easier to ignore the problem than if you had 20% unemployment – a figure that would likely trigger a huge and immediate government response as it indicates a crisis, even though those people may not be that much worse off given social security programs (although I don't know much about the US social security programs).