State of the Union?

According to this look at long-term unemployment, "there are still three times as many children living with parents who've been out of work more than six months as there were in 2007, before the recession hit."

Within higher education, many sole breadwinners count themselves among the working people qualifying for food stamps, subsisting, and generally struggling to feed children or survive at all.

Overall, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty, "More than 16 million children in the United States – 22% of all children – live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level – $23,550 a year for a family of four."

And previous articles suggest, "All told, that places 100 million people — one in three Americans — either in poverty or in the fretful zone just above it."

As always then, if you want to hear about our "state of the union," you'll need to ask a lot of different people to even come close to get a full representation of how things are. Tonight we'll see how well the President expresses understanding of all this.

The Economic Policy Institute says that President Obama may take executive action, thus bypassing Congress, to update overtime rules and raise the threshold on those eligible for overtime pay, and that this would be positive for both wages and workers.