Unemployment Insurance Claims At Record High
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Jobs
The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending March 28 was 5,840,000, an increase of 95,000 from the preceding week’s revised level of 5,745,000.The 4-week moving average was 5,647,500, an increase of 146,750 from the preceding week’s revised average of 5,500,750.
So yes, 5.84 million is an all time record. And since we’re extending unemployment benefits, a lot more of that pain is being absorbed exclusively by our federal government since states are running such big deficits right now.
But what else can we do? Not have a safety net like unemployment when the free market doesn’t provide?
In any event, this is yet another indicator that things aren’t getting better any time soon and I have serious doubts that we’ll be pulling out of this slump in the last quarter of this year as many economists predict. It’ll take a lot longer to get folks working again. So I’m talking about the 3 quarter of 2010, which is basically when more than 50% of American people think Obama fully owns the economy. At that point, the blame will be placed squarely on his shoulders.
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 and is filed under Jobs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
April 9th, 2009 at 11:05 am
Claims are high, and that’s undeniably disconcerting.
At the same time, absolute numbers are likely to give a misleading impression. There are many more Americans and American workers now than were around during previous recessions. SO it’s really incontrovertible that the more sensible way to compare current unemployment circumstances to those of past recessions is to compare the PERCENTS making claims.
Raw numbers are always misleading when used for comparison purposes without accounting for other changes that have occurred over time. For example, this is one reason why the film industry regularly reports record box office receipts. Rising ticket prices and rising population guarantee a continual flow of new “record” receipts, even though they don’t say anything about the percent of americans that watched a given movie.
I wish more people got this, and got it well enough to refrain from reporting raw numbers uncritically. If you say you do get this, but continue to report raw numbers uncritically and without caveat, then the fact is that you really DON’T get it when it comes to using percents to comparisons valid.