Unemployment is down? Negatory. REAL unemployment, do you know what that number is? I'm not talking about the massaged numbers, I'm talking the REAL unemployment. How about food stamp usage... do you know that number?
GDP??
Considering that when Obama was elected he inherited an economy that was shedding 800,000 jobs a month and GDP was falling, the GDP numbers aren't bad. I also notice that you focus on one quarter of GDP -- which happens to be only a minor gain and not the trend, which the
Conference Board forecasts at a real GDP growth of 2.3% for 2014.
It also is noticeable that you are a typical conservative that rejects official numbers you don't like as "massaged" and "skewed." It reminds me of conservatives that reject the polling data that showed that Romney was going to be defeated.
The fact is that unemployment is falling. Yes, more people are on SNAP but there are also more people in the population. But I find it ironic that conservatives don't want to raise the minimum wage but then complain that people apply for SNAP and Medicaid. In any case, neither SNAP or Medicaid usage are economic indicators.
As far as "real" unemployment goes, it depends on what you are trying to measure. There is no "real" unemployment rate, just various indicators of the state of the labor market. Fortunately, these indicators pretty much move in tandem, so we’re not usually confused about whether the market is getting better or worse. But they do measure somewhat different things, and which one you want to look at depends on what questions you’re asking.
After all, what do we mean when we say someone is unemployed? We don’t just mean “not working”, because that applies to retirees, the disabled, playboys on yachts, etc. We mean someone who wants to work but can’t find that work. But there’s some unavoidable fuzziness about both what it means to want to work and what it means to be unable to find work.
Suppose that I were to retire but could still be tempted to come out of retirement if offered a million-dollar fee. Do I want to work or not? So, the question of whether I really want work is genuinely ambiguous.
What about being able to find work? Suppose you have an expensively acquired degree, and the only jobs out there are part-time gigs at minimum wage. You might not take those jobs; in that case, is it really true that you can’t find work? Alternatively, you might indeed take such a job; is it really right in that case to say that you did find work?
That's why economists have developed practical measures that give us a good read on what is happening, even if they don’t correspond to your idea of unemployment -- you know, the measure that always makes Obama look bad.
