Interesting point that was made last night.?..Any thoughts.

[redirish28]

My wife and I and a few friends where talking about the economy and my one friend said that if this economy keeps getting worse by mid April 2009 we will see unemployment as bad as the Great Depression.

My other friend said "We are there right now". she went on to explain how you look at the population of the 1920/1930s and unemployment and then look at our unemployment and population in her point of view we will reach and similarity by the end of December.

[tavalon]

1. Our government and our media are aligned in their goal to mislead us,

so I don't know how we will know what the real numbers are.

[Warren Stupidity]

2. What, in absolute numbers?

That really doesn't make a lot of sense. There is a better argument that the proliferation of part time and unreported (underground economy) jobs vastly understates the employment problem. In either case, we are no where near the 25% unemployment rates of the great depression, nor have financial institutions and investments collapsed to the extent that they did in the 30's, although we are indeed getting close on that front.

[Warpy]

3. We're almost there right now, but not quite

We'll definitely be there next spring and there is nothing we can do to stop it. Even if Obama realizes the shit has hit the fan and the DLC is out of ideas and starts FDR like programs to put people to work repairing the infrastructure, such programs will likely not get going until summer or later.

[Idealism]

4. While it is true

that Unemployment percent highly quoted is very downplayed, considering if you were fired and couldn't find work for a quarter (I believe the cut-off to be) then you are no longer considered unemployed. You are then considered not looking for work, which means you are meaningless to the "official" unemployment count. A better measure is the U6, the unofficial unemployment measure, it is much broader.. It measures people who are "underemployed" -- who are working part-time when they'd prefer fulltime, due to less work needed to be done.

We aren't quite to Great Depression levels yet, unless you count 1940 when our official unemployment was at 12.5%, according to the U6 we are already at that level, just reached it in fact last month.

Heres some more information:
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf