Unemployment Hits 10.8%, Presidential Approval Drops to 35%

This article has spurred me to write an article response -- a different take.

The circumstances under which Reagan existed are vastly different from Obama. There are no historic parallels here, much less in these numbers and implications.

Good post for the provocation of more thought about the subject.

I wrote Ode to Ronald Reagan long ago:

I'll cling to the past for the future;

the past will make the future bright.

I'll cling to the past for the future, ah ha,

for the past will make the future right.

(c) James A. George aka Almond aka YankeeJim

Cynic: Did those unemployment figures come from  the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)? This is not to say that your data is not accurate.  Indeed, the unemployment rate was higher during part of the Reagan years. In fact it was in the 10 percent range for many months. One of the reasons for that is that the Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker was faced with double-digit inflation which began a precipitous rise under the Carter presidency. The Fed took action to control the money supply and one of the results was a cooling of the economy and consequent high unemployment rates.

The problem for Obama supporters and Republican haters such as yourself is that they fail to look at the bigger economic picture and grasp the fact that the U.S. economy nowadays is much different from the U.S. economy during the Reagan years.

Our economy today has many markings of a depression as opposed to a recession. For example, during the Reagan years many of the unemployed still had credit, home equity, and retirement funds to fall back on in financial emergencies. In other words, American's "wealth effect" didn't take the hit that it has taken in this present-day economy. Also workers (with the exception of rust belt workers, etc), once the economy got rolling again, were able to find jobs in fields that they had previously worked in. This is not the case nowadays and one of the reasons is that many good paying American jobs have been shipped overseas due to much lower labor and operating costs, not to mention less government regulation. The switch-over in manufacturing, which has been traditionally a relatively high paying field for those with just a high school education, to automation has also eliminated an estimated 5 million manufacturing jobs over the past few years.

There are almost 25 million American workers unemployed today. And most of them are not counted in the unemployment statistics. In fact, anyone that's unemployed who has not looked for work in the four weeks prior to the BLS survey is not counted as unemployed.

Economists and labor experts estimate that the American economy has to create at least 100,000 jobs per month just to absorb those entering the labor force. One does not have to be a statistician to see that given 25 million already unemployed, it's virtually impossible for the American economy to generate that many jobs in the near future. 

Ya'll inspired me: http://my.nowpublic.com/world/president-obama-s-capacity-change-and-improvement

RC did you like my poem? It comes with music.