Another Employment Measure

Last week, the Federal Government announced the Unemployment Rate of 8.8% for March with 216,000 new jobs.  My question is always related to how many people quit looking for a job or fell off the Unemployment roles.  We all know that the true Unemployment Rate is much higher in the 15-17% range.

This month, my curiosity about the real picture of Employment focused on the number of employed.  I planned to visit the Bureau Of Labor Statistics site to gather the information, but lo-and-behold, the folks at Gregor.us had already built the chart:

Below is the same Bureau Of Labor Statistics data with Percentage Change in Employment (YoY):

A few dates are highlighted above:

• January 2007 – Democrats took over the Congress
• October 2008 – TARP signed into law
• January 2009 – Obama was inaugurated

You can glean what you want from this data — certainly the recent increase in the number of employed — but the Year-Over-Year (YoY) increase in employment during the Bush years really stands out!