Unemployment

Here are a  couple of charts, and less verbiage than I usually spout.

First, Unemployment (population survey) from the BLS.  I've averaged the monthly data to get a series of annual numbers.

This is color coded by president's admin, red for Rethug, blue for Demo.   Also included are term averages for each admin.  The first thing to note is an incoming Rethug ALWAYS gives us an immediate and sharp increase in unemployment -- ALWAYS!.  Obama is reaping what Shrub has sown, but I have no sympathy for him, since he has continued the idiocy, paid no attention to the unemployed, and meanwhile the "Tough Shit" Rethugs have had their way with them.

Ponder that for an hour or a month.

Next, Kennedy-Johnson and Clinton gave us essentially monotonic decreases in unemployment for the entire span of an 8-year term.  Is anyone surprised by this?

Next note that term averages don't really tell the story.  You have to look at the beginning and end points.

Here is a different presentation of the same data.

Busy as hell, I know.  Let's sort it out.  The pink line is an 8-Yr moving average.  The slanted blue line is a linear best fit provided by Excel.  The yellow line is the average of the entire series, with green and red parallel lines one Std Dev above and below.  Speaking of parallel lines, I threw a trend channel bottom across the  1953 and 2006 extremes, and a parallel line projecting from the 1958 top. They are very close to parallel to, and equidistant from, the blue trend line, which I find to be astonishing.

This makes an intriguing picture that tells a very ugly story.

I don't see any way unemployment will ever get as low as 5% again.
.