To avoid becoming chronically unemployed, people need more than platitudes offering sympathy. Career reinvention requires encouragement and guidance.

The longer people are unemployed, the less employable they become. Skills become rusty; managers look more suspiciously at someone who has been out of work for years than a candidate already employed.

Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.

Anyone who has been around Washington politics long enough can't avoid this truism: Election-year money is like a rushing river that invariably finds cracks in any dam the reformers erect.

We have heeded no wisdom offering guidance.

Jobless workers, especially those out of work for months and years, don't have the skills to multitask in a fast-paced economy where medical workers need to know electronic record-keeping, machinists need computer skills, and marketing managers can no longer delegate software duties.