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I'm self employed, and thus unemployed by the first set of stats and employed by the second. Oh well... I am not the only one I know who is self-employed. I have no employees, although if I cannot do something, I'll hand it off to a friend in exchange for something like 5% of everything from that client. Adding employees is a costly process -- lots of regulations and crap to deal with. Many companies are moving more people to self employment. One company I worked for a few years ago is now a client, and they've got 4 or 5 self-employed people working part time. We all set our own hours, come and go as we please, and do the work. This company had NO self-employed people a few years ago. I work for them part time and others part time. There's a lot of use of "consultants". Employers benefits because they don't have to carry the extra costs. We consultants benefit because we can deduct more taxes, set our own hours, etc. I pay for my own health care plan, and I have to pay double FICA. But I can deduct legitimate business expenses: my car at 37.5 cents a mile when I go to a client, office supplies, my cable modem fee, my cell phone, and so on. I don't think I'll go back to full time employment anytime soon.

I'm a consultant, but most of my work goes through a consulting firm that treats me like an employee, because of IRS regulations. So I have FICA deducted along with medical insurance. But I only get paid when I am actually consulting. Otherwise I use my accrued vacation and the savings account we have for just this purpose.

When I find my own work for fees, I need to get back on the consulting firm payroll every now and then to keep the medical insurance functional. Our regular health care providers don't like the idea that I go on and off COBRA every now and then, but their admin costs should be built into their rates, or else they could hire me to consult on how to improve their margin.

One more point - 30 years ago my Economics professors told me that 6% unemployment was average, and 4.0% was full employment - the economy actually suffers if unemployment goes under 4.0%. I guess things have changed since then.

And, if we (the politicians) really wanted to get 200,000-500,000 AMERICANS back to work in high-paying computer technology jobs, all we (the politicians) need to do is revoke all the H1B visas and send those people back to get in line for a normal visa. And those would be jobs that Americans want.