Thursday, February 18, 2010

The Employment-Population Ratio


On February 16th, Persident Obama's Organizing for America sent an email to its list of subscribers hailing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act a success. The email included a graph of monthly job losses for the last 14 months of President Bush's term and the first twelve months of Obama's Administration. However, the chart is misleading because it does not account for the much greater number of discouraged workers who have stopped looking for work.

A better measure of the country's employment situation is the employment-population ratio. This is simply the number of people employed dived by the population. What we see over the past 26 months is that President Obama has not yet reversed the downward trend.

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