Well, I can't speak to the 'education' part, as I don't have one, myself. I think that education is overrated; I mean, If, for instance, a competent party with money came in and bought my company tomorrow? Yeah, I might go get a history degree. It would be a lot of fun. but, really, of little commercial utility. Clearly, some people do learn useful things in school, while others get little (aside from 'personal growth') from the experience.
However, the 'job skills' part? that /is/ youth unemployment. You can't get work experience... without a job. And getting a job when unemployment is high and you have no education or experience... is difficult.
I was able to get a programming gig at 17, in part, yeah, 'cause I was a smart kid, because my father and stepfather were programmers, and because I had worked through high school as an IT monkey. (My "programmer" title was a little misleading. While I did do some programming, the bulk of my work was systems administration.) But a huge factor was that it was 1997. Standards, quite simply, were lower. (I was shotgunning resumes; The one that landed me my first programming gig was me accidentally sending my resume to the place I currently worked as a call-center tech rather than the local university where I actually intended to apply. Oops.)
Now, I was able to turn my work during the dot-com into really good experience that I was able to leverage to get jobs through the crash. However I can tell you right here that if I had started out looking in 2001? I would have been fucked.
I mean, yeah, there were a bunch of factors that lead to me becoming employable. But without timing? without the economy demanding a huge number of workers with my skillset? I, as a kid with no education and no experience would very likely have not gotten a chance.
But yeah... that's the point. High unemployment rates mean that you have a large and growing segment of the population without job skills... You get job skills from... your job. It's quite difficult to come up with job skills without a job.
Hell, even if you have had a job in the past... those skills are perishable. You need to have recent experience.
So yeah; the national attention, I think, needs to be switched away from rich people problems, and focused back on the unemployment problem. Well, that or they need to figure out how to run a society with a large number of permanently unemployed folks. Some people think the natural consequence of automation is unemployment. I'm not sure I agree, but either way, Yes, long-term unemployment has long-term consequences.