Terrible economic news: 288K new jobs in April/Bush's fault

[Jason_McCullough]

Anyone have an idea where we could find the actual number of people out of work, and not just the ones receiving unemployment benefits?

See the above links about employment to population ratio.

[russellmz00]

@Stroker_Ace

There, I broke it into presidential terms for you with % change from year to year. Are you still going to claim credit for a one-quarter improvement while simultaneously writing off all of the successes of the previous decade to “outside factors”?

year   rate   delta
1990	5.6	 n/a
1991	6.8	21.43%
1992	7.5	10.29%

1993	6.9	-8.00%
1994	6.1	-11.59%
1995	5.6	-8.20%
1996	5.4	-3.57%

1997	4.9	-9.26%
1998	4.5	-8.16%
1999	4.2	-6.67%
2000	4	  -4.76%

2001	4.7	17.50%
2002	5.8	23.40%
2003	6	  3.45%

in case the point was missed: look at this old but convenient graph where it says 5.6 on both presidents’ terms. then look at whether the graph is going up or down. up is bad.

this is the third or fourth time i posted this graph in response to some bush supporter complaining about “5.6 = 5.6 and the media is biased!” over the last few months. what was the original idea/article/program that complained about this?

[Jason_McCullough]

It’s an understandable error. For example, a 5.6% unemployment rate was about the best we got in the 1980s.

There’s a few reasons why what was a really good rate then is bad now:

1. We’ve discovered the NAIRU is a lot lower than we thought.
2. Productivity is skyrocketing so much that we can drive down unemployment without inflation.
3. The unemployment rate is a very bad statistic to use over long periods; it’s more useful for a short-run up/down how-things-are-going measure.