Employment is still near a 30-year low
http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/06/news/economy/employment-rate/index.html?hpt=hp_t3
Using the most generous measurement of employment in the article (for workers ages 25 to 54 — those who should be in the prime of their careers) there is an employment rate of just shy of 76%. That translates to an _un_ employment rate of people in the same age group of 24%, well above the stated value seen in the reports we get all the time. Granted that some portion of those people are disabled, stay-at-home spouses, etc.; the real key is looking at the trend. While the article only displays the graph for the entire adult population, it reported that the trend of the smaller group mirrors the entire population and it also hasn’t been this low for 30 years (by my reading of the graph all employment is off 10% from the highs). People should be upset about this: there was a very sharp drop in employment with the Great Recession and now everyone is crowing that the recession has recovered and the markets are in record territory again, yet the employment rate is exactly the same. Who got all those returns? Not you and me!
If it weren’t for the safety net the GOP is constantly trying to further shred, we would be in the depths of a massive depression complete with soup lines, etc. The safety net, as tattered as it is, has kept our country from dragging down the entire world. This should tell everyone to strengthen it, not continue to shred it.
But we are in America where intelligence and awareness have went the way of the dodo (link provided for those of you too young to know what a dodo was).
