It’s a depression if you lose yours...
And the Gipper offered a bit of humor during the 1980 Presidential campaign by saying...
And it's a recovery when Jimmy Carter loses his.
Back in the early 80s unemployment was high. It reached 10.8%. We're a ways from that yet--and hopefully it won't reach that level with the current recession. Let's take a look at what is currently happening.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) keeps the official record on US unemployment. There are two definitions which I'd like to call to your attention:
- The unemployment rate, or U-3. This is a measure of someone without work, available for work and who has actively searched for work within the last month. U-3 is the most commonly publicized statistic regarding employment.
It is currently 8.5 percent.
- The labor underutilization rate, or U-6. This is U-3 plus people who have not actively looked for work in the past month because they got discouraged and gave up.
U-6 also measures the number of people who aren't able to find enough work, i.e. people who are working part-time when they want to work full-time. They are called the under-employed.
It is currently 15.6 percent.
Here is a chart showing U-3 unemployment statistics though the last 11 recessions, dating back to just after WWII. (Note that the latest data in this graph is only through February.)
Now let's take a look at the labor underutilization rate, U-6. Since the metric was revised in 1994, we are looking at an estimate of U-6 (upper line in orange) compared with U-3 (lower line in blue) all the way back to 1900.
Times are hard now--but you'll quickly notice that times were hard in the early 1980s--and particularly brutal during the Great Recession.
Our parents and great-grandparents faced tough times, too. There were bread lines. And there were people wondering if things would ever get better.
Well, things did get better for them--and if you're looking for work, things will get better for you, too. It can be tough. Hang in there. There will be blue skies for you...just as lyricist Irving Berlin wrote:
Blue skies
Smiling at me
Nothing but blue skies
Do I see
Bluebirds
Singing a song
Nothing but bluebirds
All day long
Never saw the sun shining so bright
Never saw things going so right
Noticing the days hurrying by
When you're in love, my how they fly
Blue days
All of them gone
Nothing but blue skies
From now on
One "government" sector that has not yet layed off people is the University of Wisconsin. But that's coming. So I guess that would be that that aspect of state government is downsizing.
ReplyDeleteEveryone believes government is too big, too inefficient, too expensive.
Government is all about providing services, so what services are we willing to take away? Let's start locally. What would you personally be willing to give up?
I'd like to see Town government eliminated because I see how the more "local" the control the more it becomes a good ol' boys system. Roads are really expensive, they require never-ending up-keep, but presently they fuel the economy and also keep a lot of laborers working. I don't want to give up garbage collection because then we'll be back to unsafe dumping.I could do with less incarceration of non-violent offenders.
Is it or is it not true that middle class Americans will be receiving a tax cut? That it is only the most wealthy that will be seeing a tax increase? Returning the tax rate to those that were instituted during the Reagan Administration?
Maybe the protests will result in some change, but to protest taxes is just so ... trite and old hat. It's been going on forever and will continue to go on forever.