U.S. Unemployment Drops Another 0.1% In October

The Labor Department released its unemployment statistics for the month of October. It probably wouldn't have made much difference, but it's a shame it came out after the election instead of before it -- because it had some good news. According to the Labor Department, there were 214,000 jobs created in October, and the official unemployment rate inched down to 5.8% (lower than it's been since July of 2008).

That's still too high, but at least it continues to move in the right direction. The nation is considered to have "full employment" when the official unemployment rate is somewhere between 3% and 4%, so we still have a couple of points to go before we get back into healthy territory (and that's ignoring the millions of unemployed who have given up trying to find a job in this faltering economy, and are no longer counted by the government as unemployed).

Why has it taken so long to get the unemployment rate back under 6%? Shouldn't that have happened a couple of years ago? Yes, it should have. But the Republicans have intentionally tried to keep the economy from recovering -- by blocking efforts to change from their failed "trickle-down" economic policies, and then adding the burden of austerity on top of that. They gambled that they could blame the faltering economy on President Obama and win at the polls -- and it looks like that finally paid off for them (thanks to the economic ignorance of many voters).

Now that they control both houses of Congress, we can expect them to continue this vicious tactic of keeping a full economic recovery from happening -- in the hope that it can win them the White House in 2016. If they now double-down on these policies, especially austerity (and I expect they will), then I think we could see the unemployment rate leveling off soon at about 5.5% and probably stay in that range until 2016. I hope not, but the Republicans have shown no propensity for change yet.

Here are the relevant statistics for October:

SIZE OF THE CIVILIAN WORKFORCE:

156,278,000

OFFICIAL NUMBER OF UNEMPLOYED WORKERS:

8,995,000

OFFICIAL UNEMPLOYMENT RATE:

5.8%

DEMOGRAPHIC BREAKDOWN OF OFFICIAL UNEMPLOYMENT RATE:

Adult men...............5.1%
Adult women...............5.4%
Teenagers (16-19)...............18.6%
Whites...............4.8%
Blacks...............10.9%
Hispanics...............6.8%
Asians...............5.0%
Less than HS diploma...............7.9%
High school grad...............5.7%
Associate's degree or some college...............4.8%
Bachelor's degree or more...............3.1%

NUMBER OF MARGINALLY-ATTACHED WORKERS (who are unemployed but no longer counted by the government and is likely an undercount):

2,192,000

MORE REALISTIC NUMBER OF UNEMPLOYED WORKERS (marginally-attached + officially unemployed workers):

11,187,000

MORE REALISTIC UNEMPLOYMENT RATE:

7.16%

NUMBER OF UNDEREMPLOYED WORKERS (working part-time because they can't find full-time work):

7,027,000

NUMBER OF UNEMPLOYED / UNDEREMPLOYED WORKERS:

18,214,000

UNEMPLOYMENT / UNDEREMPLOYMENT RATE:

11.66%