When the Democrats are in charge!
Just in from the McMahon campaign, which is reacting to the drop in unemployment to 7.8 percent.
“Today’s jobs numbers, while a step in the right direction, highlight Congressman Murphy’s continued failure to do anything that puts America back to work. With the national unemployment rate continuing to hover around 8% and Connecticut’s unemployment rate currently at 9%, it’s clear that the policies Chris Murphy has supported during his six years in Congress have only contributed to our economic woes instead of solved them. Despite ruling over the longest period of high unemployment since the Great Depression, Congressman Murphy has offered no solutions. The result of Congressman Murphy’s failure is staggering: the number of unemployed Connecticut workers has more than doubled since he was sworn-in as a Member of Congress.”
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9 Responses to When Is Lower Unemployment A Problem?
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Conspiracy theories started early today on CNBC with Rick Santelli who shouted triumphantly “I told you they’d get it under 8% — they did!”
Because if the labor force participation rate was the same as when Obama took office the U3 would be upwards of 10%, and labor force participation is still bouncing along the bottom despite the better U3. U6 isn’t that great either. Look behind the numbers…
Q: When is lower unemployment a problem?
A: When less people are working today than 3.75 years ago when this President took office.
Please stop trying to pretend the current unemployment situation in America is anything other than repulsive.
Republicans find it repulsive when the unemployment rate goes DOWN. Why don’t they cheer the hopeful sign? We all know they care more about politics than the health of the economy. They have intentionally made things worse for Americans in order to try to deny President Obama a second term. THAT is repulsive.
Mike,
A drop in unemployment from 8.1% to 7.8% during a month that GDP grew less than 2% is not realistic.
I find our employment levels repulsive; not a drop in unemployment rate. And even if the drop was reflective of reality, which it is not, 7.8% unemployment is repulsive and unacceptable in the United States.
I am not cheering high unemployment. High unemployment does not benefit me in any way. The coming Obama tax increases will hurt me less than unemployed people not being able to pay for my services.
High unemployment is awful for everyone. To suggest that Republicans are hoping for high unemployment and misery is every bit as ignorant as when Republicans were saying Democrats were cheering for death and failure in Iraq for political gain.
Jack Welch did not mention GDP in his attack on the numbers in the Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444897304578046260406091012.html
Do you have values of GDP used to get the 2.0% GDP drop? I can only find numbers for about a 1.1 % change or less.
I think the number could be realistic. It is only a 3.7% drop from 8.1 to 7.8.
What about rounding of the numbers? Per rounding rules, a 7.84 would be rounded down to 7.8 and 8.05 would be rounded up to 8.1. But they differ by only 0.21. That’s a pretty big change. Yes, they could have rounded the other way. 7.75 would get rounded up to 7.8 and 8.14 would get rounded down to 8.1 for a difference of 0.39.
I just wanted to point out that even now, today, the 0.3 number is not set in stone. Never mind the economic reasons, this is just a math reason. It could be 30% higher or lower.
They always revise these numbers later so everyone usually takes them with a grain of salt.
Mike,
I do not care about rounding, or what Jack Welch said.
The fact is a household survey was used to determine that 873,000 more people were working last month.
If you can find me any point in history where almost a million previously unemployed people found a job during the same month that GDP was less that 2 percent, I will entertain your rounding theories. In reality, this will be corrected upward, like every other unemployment report under Obama.
And why do you suppose the BLS would release this weeks’s unemployment report when the most populous state, with the 3rd worst unemployment rate provided incomplete totals?
Now you want to talk about another number. Looks like analysts agree with you. That particular number is too large to be real. That does not mean there was a conspiracy. It makes more sense to me to look at the reasons why that number is too large. Take a look at the link below. One reason he gives is the government says outright the margin of error on that number (for one month) is plus/minus 436,000 jobs. He says that even that huge admitted error band is not enough to explain the whole problem. But there are lots of other problems cited. He says economists know to take this particular number with a huge grain of salt. Don’t grab it and draw big conclusions because they admit its a flaky number. I’m not an economist. But there is some rational thought out there that the problem may be statistical and not driven by a conspiracy.
http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/some-differences-between-payrolls-report-and-household-survey
Mike,
I never said there was a conspiracy. You, and the author of this artical accused Republicans of cheering high unemployment and thinking lower unemployment was a bad thing when Democrats are in charge.
All I was saying is the unemployment numbers were not real.