One of the greatest underlying causes of economic distress in our nation is going virtually unreported, at least by name.

As millions of workers are forced out of higher-paying, often union jobs into lower-paying, typically non-union jobs; as the productivity and buying power of the economic grass-roots of our country thus weaken; as individual and business consumption, investment, and savings thus fall or grow at no more than a lackluster rate and indebtedness rises; as the tax base thus shrinks, abetted by windfall tax breaks for the well-off, and social programs are strained to the breaking point, as the middle class is torn in two; and as our government, vexed by such aggravations, sinks deeper and deeper into trillions of dollars of increasingly foreign-held debt, it becomes evident that the unspoken name of one of our worst economic enemies is underemployment.

The world is not all black and white: Although the reported rate of unemployment (complete underemployment for an individual) has dropped, the full human potential of our citizenry has not been increasingly tapped. Whether one is a homeless wretch, an "unskilled" laborer, a highly trained and/or educated professional, or one of that rare breed of "renaissance" men and women, underemployment can bedevil us all, as our nation -- no matter how militarily muscle-bound -- becomes more and more an economic wimp, increasingly outcompeted by and indebted to foreign powers making better use of their human resources.

A person is a terrible thing to waste.