Unemployment

is there any doubt that unemployment lags in usa due to outsourcing jobs to automation??? why hire a human when you can hire a computer or robot

that's part of the story, aggregate demand is the other part

Automation takes a small slice of jobs each year, and structurally speaking those jobs do not ever come back. However, if automation were proceeding at a barn-burning pace, you wouldn't see corporations sitting on such piles of cash twiddling their corporate thumbs, and you'd see the computer/robot sector of the economy growing like gangbusters and a frenzy of hype around it.

The big problems are the massive overhang of personal debt and sluggish demand, as iatee said. The business press doesn't talk much about these because it is depressing and they'd take heat for undermining consumer confidence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workhouse

the solution - if we needed more caulking supplies

If a project was somehow supporting individuals from being unemployed to being employed, is there a reasonable estimate/guestimate as to how much that might save (in the UK) if you didn't know the exact circumstances for each individual? (I'm trying to calculate if a service can justify its cost on a purely financial basis rather than other bases such as moral/social ones).

if there's a term limit on receipt of unemployment benefits (x weeks), then that gives you a bound