Richard94611 wrote:
Yes, BlurryEyed, but you are asking us all to compare apples with oranges. The traditional unemployment rate, the one I was referring to, is generally regarded as OK when it is about 5%. I am sure you wish to switch methods of calculating the unemployment rate in order to make Obama look bad, but the traditional unemployment rate is improving, no matter what you say, and we are slowly approaching (downwards) what is regarded as acceptable and more normal.
I did go back to my earlier post and try to answer your question but I did so with an update so maybe you did not see it so I will paste it in here and then add to it.
To try and answer your question about 5% yes historically that is a relatively healthy number at 4% labor markets begin to heat up and businesses have to become much more competitive to attract employees and that is typically when we see people really beginning to feel as if they are getting ahead and have real career choices, but Richard don't be fooled by these numbers, as there is a huge difference between 7.7% and 5%, the other factor that is discouraging is the U-5 and the U-6 numbers... in a healthy economy we would not see such a spread between U-3 and U-6..
I think that what is key here is that the under reporting value of U-3 when the economy is bad... back in the Oct and Nov of 2005 the rates remained unchanged across the two months with the official rate U-3 was 5.0% while U-6 was 8.7 so the gap was about 3.7, but still represented probably about 5 1/2 million people as the work force is about 150 to 155 million people, but as we are seeing this is a moving target and the government keeps reporting that it is getting smaller and this helps them to improve their numbers... but let's look at today's numbers, there is an almost full 7 point gap in these numbers so today that 5 1/2 million that the government does not report on has grown to 10 1/2 million... I would say that is somewhat slight of hand, no matter that both sides do it.