Down with Unemployment

The pesky thing about facts is that sometimes they ruin a good narrative.  Try as one might, ranting about how terrible Barack Obama is for business, the new unemployment numbers are in, and they dropped once more.  Right now, unemployment is 5.4 percent, down from 7.8 percent when he took office.  (Sorry, that should read, "way down...")  That's a drop of over 33 percent.  And a seven-year low.

I understand that there will be some who will look for ways to discredit this, for instance that the numbers are impacted by not factoring in how many people have stopped looking for work.  But those numbers are never factored in, so it's all relative.  Besides which, when unemployment drops from 7.8 percent way down to 5.4 percent, isn't the default reaction of Americans here supposed to be, "Oh, that's good to hear"?

To be fair, job gains have been a little slow.  Over, the last three months, job have increased by 191,000, which is below last year's average of 260,000.  But it's still a jobs gain, which tends to be A Good Thing.

Wages haven't increased significant -- up 2.2 over the past year, though that's about the same average as over the past six years.

By the way, the other way to determine whether unemployment figures like this are actually good or not is to flip things around and ponder what the response of Republicans would have been if this had occurred during George W. Bush's years in office.  If, rather than unemployment skyrocketing up to 7.8 percent, it had steadily dropped during his Administration it had plummeted to 5.4 percent.  I suspect we would have had dancing in the streets from that precinct, and that this this shows that Trickle-Down Economics works, amid shouts of how this proves Republicans are Good for the Economy.

But, alas, this didn't happen during the Bush Administration -- those years were busy crashing the economy.  Instead, it's during the Obama Years that unemployment has kept dropping form 7.8 percent down to 5.4 percent.  Sorry, I mean, way down.


Those pesky facts.  Sometimes, math is such a pisser.