In December 2007, the United States of America experienced a very scarce yet appealing setback. In fact, because of this specific dilemma between 200,000 and 500,000 Americans were left unemployed and without a stable home. The National Bureau of Economic Research defined this nationwide downfall as “The Great Recession”. More recently, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics the unemployment rate has not made a drastic improvement since the start of the Great Recession. Unemployment has become an issue that is still arising today with a slow rate of change. By most measures, the economy has not improved: Unemployment is up, consumer spending is down, and financial markets have not regained the ground they lost in the 2008-09 financial crisis. Due to the occurrence of the Great Recession in 2007, the employment rate has drastically dropped disabling thousands of Americans to live up to the cost of living. It is obvious that the Great Recession can merely be the cause of the high rate of unemployment. This particular financial crisis has hit the American labor market forcefully, creating a large despair of inequality, which further affects different portions of society. Unemployment rates have not only attained levels near post World War points but also reached it’s momentous highs. The crisis more severely affected groups, such as men, youth, and low-skilled individuals. Also hitting some sectors hard, including manufacturing, construction and parts of the financial industry, this crisis has become an economic nightmare. In particular, some economic activities were dramatically depressed, while others have just faced a cyclical slowdown, and some states were much more affected by the crisis than others (Estevão... ... middle of paper ... ... jobs. Ronald Reagan once said that the best "social program is a job." That type of "social program" provides revenue to the government in the form of taxation, rather than consumes money when people are on the dole. The government should get out of the way and let the job creating economic engine roar. Works Cited Abraham, K.G. and R. Shimmer, 2001, ―Changes in Unemployment Duration and Labor Force Attachment,‖ NBER Working Paper No. 8513, National Bureau of Economic Research. Estevão, M. and N. Barrera, 2008, ―House Prices and Regional Cycles in the United States,‖ United States: Selected Issues, IMF Country Report No. 08/256, Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund. Sullivan, D. and T. Von Wachter, 2009, ‖Job Displacement and Mortality: An Analysis Using Administrative Data,‖ Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 124, pp. 1265– 1306.
A key to victory this November is the unemployment rate. According to a Bloomberg National Poll conducted in March 8-11, 42% of Americans consider unemployment and jobs as “the most important issue facing the country right now” (Priorities). Although there has been 24 consecutive months of private sector employment growth, the Federal Reserve suggests that the numbers could fade in the coming months. The importance of creating more jobs cannot be stressed enough. No President in the recent era has been reelected with the unemployment rate above 7.2% (Roth). To paint a picture, in late 1982, the unemployment rate topped 10.8 under Ronald Reagan. However, about 36 months later, the rate dropped to 7.2% percent. The drastic drop in the n...
These conditions have the ability to cause recession. Now that an armistice has been reached in Korea, a recession is beginning to occur (Pach and Richardson, 54). I believe that the President’s chief concern should not be to make an immediate and fast acting restoration of the general economy. The problems of the federal deficit and the recession must wait until the more important problems are dealt with. The problem at hand is the rising rate of unemployment.
America was once known as the land of opportunity. However, that is no longer the case. Americans are still suffering from a depression that began three years ago in 2008. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2007, the United States unemployment rates were 4.6 percent. In 2009, one year after the depression began, the unemployment rate rose to 7.6 percent. Millions of Americans are living in poverty, unable to afford the basic necessities. On the other hand, there is a minuscule percent of the population that are billionaires. Written in 2005, Holly Sklar’s essay “The Growing Gulf Between the Rich and the Rest of Us” argues that if something isn’t done about the growing inequality between the rich and the poor, the American economy as a whole will weaken. A year later, the Economist published the article, “Inequality and the American Dream” implies that the American dream is broken. Sklar’s argument sheds light on the Economist’s argument. In particular, Sklar’s use of facts regarding the wealthiest Americans, the poorest Americans, and the discussion of the impact of inequality on society provide insight into the Economist’s article.
"Macroeconomics/Employment and Unemployment." Macroeconomics/Employment and Unemployment - Wikibooks, Open Books for an Open World. N.p., n.d. Web. 04 July 2017.
Briefly state the main idea of this article: The main idea of this article is that economic inequality has steadily risen in the United States between the richest people and the poorest people. And this inequality affects the people in more ways than buying power; it also affects education, life expectancy, living conditions and possibly happiness. Another idea that he brought up was that the American government tends to give less help to the unemployed than other rich countries.
In “The Way to Wealth” Benjamin Franklin writes, “We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly” trying to prove a point that frequently people are being taxed an outrageous amount and are taxing themselves extra by actions like spending excessive amounts of money (Franklin 237). Throughout Franklin’s “The Way to Wealth,” he explains how an American economy should work and maintain a stabilized economy for themselves. In the American realm today, about 5.0% of people find themselves facing unemployment, a time of stress and conflict (“Databases, Calculators & Tables by Subject”). With the unemployment rates rising for the first time since February of 2015, the American economy is also facing an increase in debt levels throughout personal households
Throughout the 1970s, the ability of any one person to work hard enough to transcend social stratification in the United States became difficult due to various domestic challenges. The reality Americans begun to see during the ‘70s was bleak, this being contributed in great part to ecopolitical events. In the year 1974, a recession begun that has continued to affect the United States economy to this very day. Harold Meyerson, a writer and journalist for the Washington Post and The American Prospect in the article “The 40-Year Slump” notes “The middle-income jobs of the nation’s postwar boom years have disproportionately vanished. Low-wage jobs have disproportionately burgeoned. Employment has become less secure. Benefits have been cut. The dictionary definition of “layoff” has changed, from denoting a temporary severance from one’s job to denoting a permanent severance” (1). It is important to consider this point because it really lays the foundation of the 1970’s; one of little hope, and one shaken by what became known as the 1973-1975 Recession. This recession affected practically every person living in the U.S, and changed the perception of the workplace. Through low-economic growth and high inflation, the economic term “stagflation” came about, and negatively influenced the success of countless Americans. Alejandro Reuss, co-editor for the magazine Dollars & Sense in the article “That ‘70s Crises” asserts "The economy seemed trapped in the new nightmare of “stagflation,” so called because it combined low economic growth and high unemployment (“stagnation”) with high rates of inflation” (1). This is a valuable point to consider, as this term is still used to this day, and has affected all aspects of life for many Americans. Mic...
This disruption gives those who have lost their jobs to improve themselves by furthering their education. The psychological effects on displaced workers only last until they find a replacement job. Today, the national unemployment rate is at five percent according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (Databases). Economic experts believe that technological advances are expanding at a faster rate than humans can learn to manage and adapt to the new skills necessary to survive in the evolving labor
The most often cited cause of the decline of the middle class in the United States is stagnant wages. Between 1955 and 1970, real wages adjusted and inflation rose by an average of 2.5 percent per year. Between 1971 and 1994, the average growth of real wages was 0.3 percent a year. The stagnation of wages has been especially noticeable to middle-class people, who rely very much on the money they make at their jobs. Recessions seem to hit higher income households much harder, which sends them down to the middle class. Middle-income households may or may not be more likely than higher-income households to qualify for unemployment compensation when jobs are scarce. But those who do are more likely than high-income households to receive benefits that replace a greater share of their regular wages, which helps them maintai...
What seems to go unnoticed by many Americans is the evident and growing wealth gap. According to Pew Research Center, the current U.S. income is at its highest since 1928. This large dispersion of wealth can be attributed by the “fall [of the] routine producers” (Reich). Where jobs that were once attainable during the 70s are declining due to advancing technology and corporations finding workers in poor countries who are willing to work at half the cost of the routine producers. What also drives this wealth gap is the power of corporations in an age of extravagant consumerism. Through media, the demand to buy what we want is unavoidable. Corporations are able to gain revenue while people go unemployed because of America’s vast opportunities to buy what we want when we want it.
Morris, J. K., Cook, D. and Shaper, A. (1994) ‘Loss of Employment and Mortality’, British Medical Journal, 308, 1135-9.
Mouhammed, A. H. (2011). Important theories of unemployment and public policies. Journal of Applied Business and Economics, 12(5), 100-110.
Money is an essential part of life where every people can satisfy whatever they need and every person in America has a chance to find a job. However, some of the people in the country wanted to go on with their life freely by being a part of a welfare. Furthermore, distribution of wealth is a huge demand of every citizen. Everyone today is trying to look down for every people in the lower class, as they did not give any benefit to the country, waiting for the benefits that they will receive from the government. For instance, when most lower class people have gone through a financial crisis due to overspending, insufficient fund or pay for their work to support themselves and/or their family. The example shows that lower class people made the economy of the country unstable, however, the middle class and the higher class is at fault as well. Furthermore, even though the benefit of that the lower class received is from the middle class, the middle class as well benefits from the higher class. To sum up, every class is at fault towards giving the country’s economy a positive
Unemployment has always been something that Americans have worried about since the great depression in which one in every four people was unemployed. High unemployment has an impact on every one even those whom are still currently employed. For example if the unemployment rate is particular high then even those with jobs get worried. Unemployment is also separated in to distinct categories base on which group is the focus of the study. The categories can be by race, age or location, for example the unemployment rate of those between the age of sixty and sixty-five could be compared those between the ages of thirty and thirty-five. These categories allow economist to see which groups are the best and which groups are worst off. One group particularly bad off is the age group referred to as teenagers. This paper is going to focus on how teenage unemployment affects the economy and what possible solutions there are.
Unfortunately, there are many Americans out of work in today’s current declining economy. Unemployment can be defined as a person who is out of work involuntary, not by choice. These people are looking jobs and available to start work. Being unemployed can be disheartening and deciding what the next step is can be challenging. Underemployed can be described as being inadequately employed, such as a low-paying job that requires fewer skills than one possess. (Daly, Hobijn, and Kwok 2015) Making ends meet can be difficult for one who has been affected by this economy over the past few years. America still has a high unemployment rate since the decline of the current job market. And many Americans are struggling to establish the skills needed for employment, or the underemployed are force to lower they skill to make a profit. America’s economic status has force the underemployed and unemployed to make ends meet with the current jobs available. And last but not least some have also utilized these difficult times to venture into new discoveries to make life hassle free. So, we wonder is Americans giving up in today’s economy or do they settle for lower end job to establish a steady income to make ends.