psychojester of the Seven Seas wrote:
While the unemployment rate hasn't skyrocketed, it has increased. Here are the facts. Notice the decline during Clinton years, and the incline during Bush years.
Sure. Um... A 5.7% national unemployment is not skyrocketing by any means. It's not even "bad". Go take an economics class sometime. Higher unemployment is not always a bad thing. Most economicists agree that around a 5% unemployment is ideal for most economomies (especially relative free market ones like in the US). Any amount of deviation from that, higher or lower, is equally bad.
5.7% is a very nice and healthy rate to be at. You've got to remember, this number is not always indicative of someone who just plain can't get a job. It's just an average amount of people who happen to be unemployed at any given time during the year. It includes seasonal hires, and people leaving one job for another (how many people take that 2 weeks severance + vacation they accrued before starting up at the new job? Think about it). You have to have a certain amount, or there's no one to hire.
Depending on who you talk to, a rate lower then 5% is *worse* then one higher. At the very least, the scale is more severe. You've only got that small amount to work with and every little bit hurts industry if they can't hire the labor they need when they need it. A 4% rate (like Clinton had one year) is generally considered to be a lot more harmful to the economy then a 5.7 (heck. Probably worse then having a 6 or 7 percent rate). Lower is not always better when it comes to this rate, despite what people think.
5.7 is fine. Heck. 6 is fine. You could probably up it to 7 or 8 before you really need to start worrying about unemployment rates. And that really depends on what kind of unemployment you have (which is incredibly hard to figure out without spending hours and hours pouring through the data). It's better to have a 10% rate where people are unemployed for maybe 2 weeks at a time, then to have a 3% rate where people are unemployed for 6 months at a time. In the former, everyone is still "working" sufficiently to keep themselves fed, clothed and sheltered (and is actually an indication of a shifting market, usually brought on by some kind of tech change). In the later, you've got 3% of your workforce on the dole (ie: you've got some sort of market stagnation to the point where they just can't get a job for long periods of time). But you can't see that just from looking at the rate itself.