What the hell is with Robt Reich? He just said "Recovery will

be when unemployment is 3% and all wages are much higher."


Unemployment at 3% is considered no unem
As for wages going up, that wouldn't be recovery...it would be tremendous GROWTH!

What's happened to Reich?

And yes, I meant that to be snarky.

Even in the Clinton Administration the lowest we got to was 3.9%.

Remember under Bush, we had what they called a jobless recovery. Reich wants a recovery that doesn't leave people out.

takes full employment to indicate we're in a recovery!

Higher wages and 3% unemployment isn't when recovery begins... that's when it's done and we're in good shape.

Someone in the Obama administration must have told a short guy joke.

In a mixed economy with elements of capitalism and socialism, the best one could realistically hope for is 10% unemployment. If you can get at 10% or lower, you're doing relatively good.

When I say "10%," I mean an honest assessment of unemployment, not the crap successive administrations have pushed out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics over the last 30 to 40 years.

While it may be true that under Clinton it got down to "4%," that really only means the true unemployment rate was probably closer to 8% or perhaps higher.

The only time you could get lower than that is if you were inside the Soviet Union where everybody had a job doing something or you were in the United States when it was fighting the Second World War and drafted everybody to help win it.

I'm going to look it up but I wanted your input because you imply that it was higher than I recall.

On edit:
1952-53, it ranged from 2.5 to 3.1.
In 1968-69, it was less than 4%

I believe BLS started measuring unemployment differently in the Reagan years so I think these numbers from before then are pretty accurate.

I don't understand why you say the best we can expect is 10% unemployment.

It was subtle and just a tweak, but each successive administration has added to it and now we're at he point where government numbers on unemployment, inflation, and cost of living are meaningless.

What Reich wants is what used to be considered normal in good times, those conditions created the middle class. It is frightening how far our expectations have fallen and how much excessive greed we have come to accept in just one generation.

Full employment should be the goal.

I don't believe even nations inside the Eurozone pursue the policy of full employment anymore. The way they record unemployment is probably closer to reality than right wingers care to admit. In countries such as France and Germany, they have only ever been able to get down just below 10% during the 1990s, and those were considered boom years. We're talking "doing good" when real unemployment is sitting at 7 or 8%. During the last recession in Europe, unemployment levels typically hovered between 11% to 13%. I cannot guess how much higher it is currently due to the housing bubble explosion and the following credit freeze, since I haven't referenced their unemployment numbers for the last couple of years.

Ultimately, in an economy where private ownership prevails, unemployment is a feature seen in all mixed economies that lean towards capitalism. I cannot think of any case where labor shortages were not met with the importation of cheap labor overseas or even outright encouragement of illegal immigration, which has been a common tact with many members in the Chamber of Commerce.

There has always been a surplus of labor as long as private ownership of capital existed. It's due to the desire of producers to get as much labor out of their existing labor pool before hiring new laborers. It is essentially a feature of modern capitalism.

The only time the supply of labor basically matched the demand for labor in the United States was during World War 2, and that was because the federal government essentially hired everybody who wasn't working to fight the war effort and then some. Since then, the government has basically swung away from the notion of achieving full employment, probably because alloting money for a public works program is politically unfeasible given the number of right wing Democrats and right wing Republicans populating Congress, and any money that was available for such a notion in the past dried up with the increasing size of the military budget and the cutting of taxes for the wealthiest one percent of Americans.

Now we have no money.

Had Bush not taken office we would have got there under Gore.

The BLS recorded unemployment differently under JFK and LBJ than it did under FDR/Truman. Further changes were made when Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton entered office, with each successive administration's tweaking leading to lower unemployment recordings than with the previous standards. Even under FDR, there are arguments that the FDR-era BLS under-reported real unemployment figures. Unemployment dropped to almost nothing under FDR/Truman because the nation was locked in a grim struggle to win a world war.

A lot of history text books often quote around 25% unemployment during the Great Depression, but there is argument that even that figure downplayed the real unemployment situation during that era with some arguing it was closer to 30% or 33% given that a) reporting lay-offs with firms of a particular size and larger were not required or standard practice, b) unemployment insurance did not yet exist at least until after 1935 giving less impetus for anyone to keep track of unemployment, and c) many laid-off workers simply migrated away making it difficult to track.

As far as Gore goes, it wouldn't have been his call anyway. Republicans had a very solid grip on Congress in 2000. They would never have allotted money needed for programs with the aim of full employment because employers were and still are against full employment.

n/t

:thumbsup: