The UK's share of the 11 million 15-24 year olds who are unemployed across the OECD is 1 million. Greece and Spain fare worse with rates of over 50% of the total youth labour force, but the UK is fast catching up with the rest of Europe who have experienced high numbers of unemployment for quite some time.
Further, youth long-term unemployment has risen by 874% since 2000.
There's more bad news.The Centre for the Modern Family have found that not only are 18 to 34 year-olds more likely to have resorted to selling items online in the past 12 months to make ends meet (32%), compared to the UK average (22%), but one in ten young people have found themselves needing to take out high-interest credit to get by.
Another unhappy surprise is that the number of people taking out Debt Relief Orders (DROs), which were created by the government in 2009 to protect creditors who have debts of less than £15,000, who are aged between 25 and 34 is more than any other age group.
The outlook is as bleak for young graduates today as well. A total of around 1.4 million people are not getting the hours they want or need, with this statistic being around 1 in 2 graduates either jobless or "underemployed". This figure sees a jump of about 30% in the last four years.
In Keynes' text Economic Possibilities of Our Grandparents, he once fancied that beyond the small things we need to do for ourselves:
we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter - to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
Trouble is, if a young person today is lucky enough to be in employment, it is quite likely they will be working something near to the fifteen-hour week, but struggling to make ends meet as a consequence.
This government as we know is trying to cut spending and raise taxes as a means of reducing the budget deficit. But this means cutting spending power out of the economy, or in other words there is a watch on how much the government is spending, but a simultaneous reduction in the government's own income as a consequence.
The £375bn that has been pumped into banks to, among other things, loosen up risk-averse lending practices, has done little such thing. Research in November by the Federation of Small Businesses showed that between 2007 and 2010 there was a 24 per cent fall in successful loan applications, while more than half of the small firms that applied for an overdraft last year were rejected.
The case for a British Investment Bank is writ large.
There is more today than just Osborne's plan A. And there are ways of getting the banking sector lending again, in the pursuit of jobs, growth, investment and shared prosperity.
But our government believes youth is wasted on the young, clearly.