7 thoughts on “Hope And Change”

  1. Eventhough the Stimulus failed to do what we, the American people, were told it would do by our political class; I suppose we still cannot call it a failure and question our government when it makes other promises.

  2. We are looking at a slow Christmas season and the usual downturn afterwards. I would be suprised to see 14 percent by March 2010.

  3. But the Obama administration “created or saved” a million jobs. Think how much worse it’d be, if he didn’t do that? We might have unemployment over 9%!

  5. Actually the numbers are worst then they seem. The U.S. narrowed the definition of unemployment in the 1990’s. If you the same measure as was used in the 1930’s it is now 17.5 percent.

    http://voices.washingtonpost.com/economy-watch/2009/11/truer_us_unemployment_rate_hit.html?hpid=topnews

    The Ticker
    Truer U.S. unemployment rate hits recent high of 17.5%

    [[[But the truer measure of unemployment — a total count of everyone who should be working full time but is not — hit 17.5 percent in October, the highest level in modern times.]]]

    [[[The Labor Department changed to its new unemployment survey method in the mid-’90s, moving to the narrower count that gives you the official number, or today’s 10.2 percent. Which, by the way, is nothing to sneeze at. It’s the highest rate since 1983.

    Counts were obviously cruder during the Great Depression, but the 25 percent rate, reached during 1933, is analogous to our 17.5 percent today. Both numbers include the widest possible measure of unemployment.]]]

  6. I caught a small portion of Obama discussing the unemployment rate today. The bullet headline on CNN accompanying was something like “Unemployment always lags recovery.” That must be the talking point, “It’s always darkest before the dawn, yada yada…” The “1 million jobs saved” of course was mentioned as well.

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