Hoping for change? The evidence now indicates that youth unemployment in America has now surpassed Europe and other developed countries, marking a stark turnaround from previous trends. The United States has become a land of diminishing opportunity for the young.

If you think being jobless is tough, try applying for unemployment benefits. In Florida, simply filling out the form requires considerable talent and endurance. According to a recent ruling by the federal Department of Labor, the state’s new online application process is so fraught with arbitrary obstacles that it violates federal civil rights protections.

In their groundbreaking new book, The Bankers’ New Clothes, Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig, two of the world’s most prominent and respected academics in finance and economics, expose the lies propagated by those who fight so dramatically to preserve the broken status quo. Argument by argument, scare tactic by scare tactic, they take on the bankers’ arguments and shred them, one by one, exposing them as nothing more than self-serving justifications for preserving a system that serves only the banks, not the general public. And most importantly, they do so in plain English with real world examples that are familiar to anyone who has ever had a bank account, a credit card, or a mortgage. They make the complex simple, and in so doing, reveal that as taxpayers we have been on the wrong side of a decades-long con that has enriched a handful of bankers while the rest of us suffer for their excesses.

While it seems Congress has forgotten that we have been suffering with unacceptably high unemployment for years regular Americans have not. Once again the top concern for Americans is the economy and followed a close second by unemployment.

The story of robotics replacing workers in manufacturing is nothing new but now it seems that robots are moving into the once unthinkable sector of service jobs. The kind of work some previously thought only humans could do.

Meet Baxter.

Speaker John Boehner might want to take a word of advice from Speaker John Boehner because according to him there is no immediate crisis. In an interview with ABC News Speaker Boehner admitted that, contrary to much of his and his party’s rhetoric, there actually is not a debt crisis.

The Australian minimum wage this year is $15.96 per hour. I know this mostly because my daughter lives in Melbourne these days (not forever, I hope). When she arrived there 18 months ago, she got a job at a minimum-wage restaurant. She earned enough to cover her rent and other expenses.

The January Jobs reports are out and for once, there is a modicum of (somewhat) good news. The Labor Department reported 157K new jobs for January 2013 and significantly revised both November and December 2012 numbers upwards.

Well, it looks like there is a new push on in the long term destruction of Social Security today. Now, I usually write about the plight of the long term unemployed and underemployed but I am getting close to Social Security eligibility so decided I would discuss the anti Social Security effort today.

It’s always entertaining to read Robert Samuelson’s columns on Monday mornings. They are so deliciously orthogonal to reality. Today’s column, asking whether America is in decline, is another gem.