Regular readers know that the actually pertinent unemployment measure is what the feds call U6 — the unemployed, plus those working part-time who want to work full-time, and those who have given up looking for work.

With the sensational job Barack Obama and his minions have done wrecking the American economy, what if the U.S. economy looks like this forevermore?

Consider a selection from the 22 Independent Journal “fun facts” about Obama’s economy that are not fun at all:

1. The Number Of Americans That Have Joined The Food Stamp Program Since Obama Took Office: 19.4 Million.

2. The Number Of People Unemployed At The End Of Obama’s Fifth Year As President: 10.4 Million.

3. The Number Of People Working Part-Time That Would Like To Work Full-Time: 7.8 Million.

4. The Number Of People That Have Entered Poverty Since 2008: 6.7 Million.

5. Americans Who Received Cancellation Notices For Their Health Plans Due To ObamaCare After Obama Promised They Could Keep Their Plans In His 2010 State Of The Union Address: 5 Million.

6. The Number Of Americans Struggling With Long-Term Unemployment Of 27 Weeks Or Over: 3.9 Million.

7. The Increase In Americans Struggling With Long-Term Unemployment Since Obama Became President: 1.2 Million.

8. Construction Jobs (aka “Shovel-Ready Jobs”) Lost Since Obama Took Office: 721,000.

9. Manufacturing Jobs Lost Since Obama Took Office: 528,000.

10. The Number Of People That Left The Labor Force In December: 347,000. …

14. The Decline In Median House Hold Income Since Obama Became President: $3,827.

15. Increase In Family Health Care Premiums Under Obama, Despite His Claim That ObamaCare Would Reduce Premiums During His 2010 State Of The Union Address (Subsidies Being Irrelevant): $3,671.

16. The Last Time The Labor Force Participation Rate Was At Its Current level: 1978.

17. Increase In The Average Price Per Gallon Of Gas Since Obama Took Office: 79%.

18. The Percent Of Unemployed That Are 18-34 Year Olds: 46%.

19. Average Number Of Weeks Someone Will Be Unemployed: 37.

All this prompts Mark Steyn to observe:

Who has a greater grasp of the economic contours of the day after tomorrow — [Amazon.com’s Jeff] Bezos or Obama? My colleague Jonah Goldberg notes that the day before the president’s speech on “inequality,” Applebee’s announced that it was introducing computer “menu tablets” to its restaurants. Automated supermarket checkout, 3D printing, driverless vehicles . . . what has the “minimum wage” to do with any of that? To get your minimum wage increased, you first have to have a minimum-wage job. …

What do millions of people do in a world in which, in Marxian terms, “capital” no longer needs “labor”? America’s liberal elite seem to enjoy having a domestic-servant class on hand, but, unlike the Downton Abbey crowd, are vaguely uncomfortable with having them drawn from the sturdy yokel stock of the village, and thus favor, to a degree only the Saudis can match, importing their maids and pool-boys from a permanent subordinate class of cheap foreign labor. Hence the fetishization of the “undocumented,” soon to be reflected in the multi-million bipartisan amnesty for those willing to do “the jobs Americans won’t do.”

So what jobs will Americans get to do? We dignify the new age as “the knowledge economy,” although, to the casual observer, it doesn’t seem to require a lot of knowledge. One of the advantages of Obamacare, according to Nancy Pelosi, is that it will liberate the citizenry: “Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.” It’s certainly true that employer-based health coverage distorts the job market, but what’s more likely in a world without work? A new golden age of American sculpture and opera? Or millions more people who live vicariously through celebrity gossip and electronic diversions? One of the differences between government health care in America compared to, say, Sweden is the costs of obesity, heart disease, childhood diabetes, etc. In an ever more sedentary society where fewer and fewer have to get up to go to work in the morning, is it likely that those trends will diminish or increase?

Consider Vermont. Unlike my own state of New Hampshire, it has a bucolic image: Holsteins, dirt roads, the Vermont Teddy Bear Company, Ben & Jerry’s, Howard Dean . . . And yet the Green Mountain State has appalling levels of heroin and meth addiction, and the social chaos that follows. Geoffrey Norman began a recent essay in The Weekly Standard with a vignette from a town I know very well — St. Johnsbury, population 7,600, motto “Very Vermont,” the capital of the remote North-East Kingdom hard by the Quebec border and as far from urban pathologies as you can get. Or so you’d think. But on a recent Saturday morning, Norman reports, there were more cars parked at the needle-exchange clinic than at the farmers’ market. In Vermont, there’s no inner-city underclass, because there are no cities, inner or outer; there’s no disadvantaged minorities, because there’s only three blacks and seven Hispanics in the entire state; there’s no nothing. Which is the real problem. …

“Work” and “purpose” are intimately connected: Researchers at the University of Michigan, for example, found that welfare payments make one unhappier than a modest income honestly earned and used to provide for one’s family. “It drains too much of the life from life,” said Charles Murray in a speech in 2009. “And that statement applies as much to the lives of janitors — even more to the lives of janitors — as it does to the lives of CEOs.” Self-reliance — “work” — is intimately connected to human dignity — “purpose.”

So what does every initiative of the Obama era have in common? Obamacare, Obamaphones, Social Security disability expansion, 50 million people on food stamps . . . The assumption is that mass, multi-generational dependency is now a permanent feature of life. A coastal elite will devise ever smarter and slicker trinkets, and pretty much everyone else will be a member of either the dependency class or the vast bureaucracy that ministers to them. And, if you’re wondering why every Big Government program assumes you’re a feeble child, that’s because a citizenry without “work and purpose” is ultimately incompatible with liberty. The elites think a smart society will be wealthy enough to relieve the masses from the need to work. In reality, it would be neo-feudal, but with fatter, sicker peasants. It wouldn’t just be “economic inequality,” but a far more profound kind, and seething with resentments.