Ok, so as I understand it one of the factors that tells you if you’re in a Recession or Depression is the unemployment rate. Since I’ve been hearing all these people crying about how we are headed for a Depression I decided I would check the unemployment rate over the years. I can only find data back to 1948 but it’s interesting even just that far.<\/p>\n
In 1948 the rate was around 4%. That would be considered pretty low. Over the years it’s gone up and down but the most interesting to me is when Reagan took over in 1981 the rate was 7.5%. Over the next year it went up to 10.8% by the end of 82 but then it started coming down. By the end of Reagan’s 2nd term is was 5.3%. Then Bush 1 took over and the rate slowly went up to about 7.8%. It started falling just before Clinton took over and kept falling all the way to 3.9%.<\/p>\n
When Bush 2 took over the rate slowly went up to a little over 6% but then it came down to around 4% and then started climbing to the 6.5% it is at now.<\/p>\n
The interesting part of this is the rate has been much higher several times in the years from 48 to now but this is the first time I can remember people thinking we are ready to enter another Depression. I understand saying we are in a Depression is not just the unemployment rate, it’s also the GDP and a few other factors but those factors are far from where they would need to be to call it that.<\/p>\n
I think some of this is Bush Derangement Syndrome. People want it to be bad so they can point at him and say SEE?<\/p>\n
Yes the banks are in trouble but maybe we shouldn’t bail them out. Maybe we should just let them fail and let the chips fall where they may. We might find out this country is a lot stronger than some people think. Since it’s not up to me I guess we will never know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ok, so as I understand it one of the factors that tells you if you’re in a Recession or Depression is the unemployment rate. Since I’ve been hearing all these people crying about how we are headed for a Depression I decided I would check the unemployment rate over the years. I can only find […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/donlafferty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/donlafferty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/donlafferty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/donlafferty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/donlafferty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=388"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/donlafferty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":389,"href":"https:\/\/donlafferty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388\/revisions\/389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/donlafferty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/donlafferty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/donlafferty.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}