So many places and people have been making the point recently that Obama is such a great president because just look at the new low 5.9% unemployment rate. Isn't he wonderful!? (Insert dreamy swoon.)
Well, let me see. As I recall 2-4% is considered normal, so this is still bad for a supposedly recovered economy. Also that 5.9% only considers those who count as unemployed, and not underemployed or out of the labor force. Those numbers are still very high. Disturbingly high really, when you consider how many people those numbers represent. People who cannot get the satisfaction of putting their skills and passions to use. People who feel like they have been banished from the economy. People who probably don't care about the unemployment rate because it isn't helping them or their situation. It's just a number some people get to through around to their benefit.
The 'lies' of these numbers do not end at being failing fully representative of the time though because they also cannot be compared to much of the past. One of the things this administration accomplished was changing how unemployed was measured, or at least how the official number is reported. I don't quite recall which it was when, but I do remember that one method relied on the number of jobs business reported adding while the other surveys households for employment. Changes in metrics like that make direct comparison impossible, without a lot of thick math to compensate for the change, which will also introduce new uncertainty and that may make the final result useless anyway.
Nobody is quite sure who said the saying first, but they were right, whoever they were.
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