Joe - You should have read or quoted the entire section from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Unemployment/Underemployment. Especially paragraphs 3 and 4. The numbers I used to illustrate the underemployed are those the government uses.

"The fruits of the potential labor of the unemployed are lost to them and to the economy. Similarly, for people who are unable to work as many hours each week as they would like, their potential output and earnings for the hours in which they were willing but unable to work are also lost. Such workers are sometimes considered "underemployed."

Because of the difficulty of developing an objective set of criteria which could be readily used in a monthly household survey, no official government statistics are available on the total number of persons who might be viewed as underemployed. Even if many or most could be identified, it would still be difficult to quantify the loss to the economy of such underemployment.

The Government does collect data on workers who wish to work full time but, because of business and economic conditions, worked fewer than 35 hours during the survey week. There are two main types: The first consists of persons who usually work full time but whose hours had been temporarily cut back because of slack work or unfavorable business conditions. The second consists of persons who usually work fewer than 35 hours because they had been unable to find full-time work or because of slack work or business conditions.

Underemployment in the form of shortened hours is relatively easy to measure. Other kinds of underemployment, though easy to illustrate, are not so easily quantified. One kind of underemployment occurs when persons take jobs that do not make use of, or pay according to, their skills, training, and experience. An extreme example would be an aerospace engineer working in a fast-food restaurant because no engineering position was available. Another kind of underemployment occurs when an individual does not have the necessary equipment to achieve maximum efficiency and output. A farmer who uses a mule and a handplow may work longer and harder and yet may harvest a much smaller crop than a neighbor who works less but has a modern tractor.

Underemployment in a highly industrialized country like the United States is not the serious problem that it is for most developing countries. Nevertheless, to the extent that it does occur, underemployment represents a waste of resources and, therefore, is a subject of continuing interest.

BLS has published a series of reports since 1982 that look beyond unemployment and examine other labor market problems faced by workers and assess the impact of these problems on their economic status and that of their families and households. In addition to unemployment, the reports focus on the issues of involuntary part-time employment and low earnings among full-time workers in the labor force for more than half of the year. Statistics for persons with these problems are then linked with data on income to determine how many of these people have incomes below the poverty level and/or live in families with incomes below the poverty level.4"

As for your characterization or the Wall Street Journal - typical from you. As for your other comments - pure poppycock from some progressive web site. As for your claim that we are paying the lowest tax rate since 1950 - I've posted in the past the information that shows that claim is just not true. Have a nice weekend.... look forward to more debate next week.