I'm starting with an article at Counterpunch that takes a look at The Employment Rate and Economic Health:

For decades, familiar economic indicators, such as the unemployment rate, the national interest rate and the nation’s total gross domestic product, have been used by the power elites in the government, the media and the business sector to inform us whether or not we as a nation are doing well. These numbers are used by professionals and politicians in our government to direct fiscal policy, presumably to help as many Americans as possible achieve the American Dream.

How many Americans are unemployed doesn't matter as much as how the unemployed are counted:

Let’s start by disabusing the public of the widely held but erroneous notion that the unemployment rate reflects how many Americans are unemployed. No, this is false. Instead, what the unemployment rate reflects is the share of people who are out of work but actively searching for it at least once within the past four weeks. The rate does not include Americans who are unemployed but who have given up searching for work.

That's why the unemployment rate can go down even when the jobless rate goes up. In addition, people with marginal temp jobs are counted as employed and some people are not counted:

If that were not bad enough, the rate does not count temporary workers. In other words, temporary workers who seek full-time work but have not found it are considered employed. The unemployment rate intentionally omits retired people, schoolchildren, and stay-at-home spouses. As you can see the unemployment rate misses a large number of unemployed Americans. This is why it is such an unreliable economic indicator.

The unemployment rate also does not include the large population of homeless Americans. Here's one way to count full employment:

However, as African-American human rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton has noted when lamenting the relative impoverishment of the African-American community even during economic boom times, “We were at full employment during slavery.”

That raises the question of how you measure economic health:

However, history and present experience clearly inform us that the economic indicators reported by the government are unequal to the task of adequately reporting our true state of economic health. This is because numbers alone could never tell of the real economic misery millions of Americans are always facing in this draconian, trickle-down economy.

America seriously needs a wake up call:

Today, despite the rosy economic indicators, we know that America’s true state of economic health is poor. In fact, America suffers from the worst wealth and income disparity the world has ever known.

Some questions to consider from a long list provided in the article:

How many of the available jobs in our economy pay a living wage?

How many of the available jobs are temporary employment jobs?

What benefits are these companies offering their workers?

Now let's move to the issue of a Housing Wage from The National Low Income Housing Coalition in 2014:

This year, the national two-bedroom Housing Wage of $18.92. The Housing Wage represents the hourly wage a full-time worker must earn in order to afford a modest rental home while spending no more than 30% of their income toward housing costs. This means that nationally a household must have income of least $39,360 a year in order to afford a two-bedroom unit at the Fair Market Rent (FMR) of $984 per month.

Here's how much the estimated income was for an L.A. resident to rent a modest apartment in 2015:

You need to earn at least $33 an hour — $68,640 a year — to be able to afford the average apartment in Los Angeles County, according to Matt Schwartz, president and chief executive of the California Housing Partnership, which advocates for affordable housing.

So it's no surprise that Los Angeles has been rated as the most unaffordable city to rent in America by Harvard and UCLA.

How about buying a home?

So it's no surprise that Los Angeles has been rated as the most unaffordable city to rent in America by Harvard and UCLA.

Recent discussion of inequality has just scratched the surface of how both political parties, the media and economic theories have worked in tandem to destroy the middle class. There is still plenty of heavy lifting ahead.