Having grown up in the 1960s and lived through the terrible employment situation which prevailed in this country off and on from 1975 arguably through 1996, Barack Obama now owns the dubious distinction of a worse unemployment record than even Ronald Reagan's, and that's saying something.
From the time of Reagan's election in November 1980 right on through December 1985, unemployment stayed at or above 7% for 61 straight months, with an average report of unemployment coming to 8.31%. The severity of it was highlighted in 1981 and 1982 by a string of ten months with unemployment in excess of 10%. It was a brutal time, especially for older workers with homes and families whose dreams for the future were arrested, and for young people who had to start their careers at the very bottom, just as many of their depression-era parents had had to do.
Hard as it may be to believe, unemployment under Barack Obama is now even worse than it was under Reagan. Obama's average report of unemployment over the last sixty months, none of which has been lower than 7%, the same as the case with Reagan but short of one month (we'll see if the 7% threshold is broken in the December figures come January), now stands at an incredible 8.67% even though there's been only one month, October 2009, at 10%. Combined with the housing, stock market and banking collapses, a bona fide if small depression with negative GDP in 2008 and 2009, and a much older, less adaptive population, the impact of unemployment on the psyche and fortunes of the nation this time around is understandably more acute.
From the long term perspective, unemployment took a systemic turn for the worse in America since the mid-1970s, shortly after we adopted the free trade mania which has done nothing except create a middle class abroad at the expense of the middle class at home. Our chief export has been the prosperity of the nation's vast middle, chiefly through housing which Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich helped Americans tap like an ATM to buy goods, mostly made abroad. Owner's equity in housing is half what it used to be in this country, squandered away by the squanderers, the Baby Boom.
If you want America to continue to exist, fix that by forcing people to save again, since no one seems to know how to do so for themselves, for the obvious reason. It doesn't really matter how we do it, but do it we must, or it's curtains.
(view the chart here at The Wall Street Journal)
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