US Unemployment Problem Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

US Unemployment Problem - Essay Example Connectively, unemployed people include all those people who have been laid of temporarily from their work. Unemployment rate may be determined by taking the number of unemployed people as a fraction of labour force. Whereby, labour force may be obtained by adding the number of unemployed and employed people. In 1948, the United States unemployment rate was reported to be 5.81%, this rate decreased up to 2.5% in 1953. Additionally, unemployment rates continued to increase significantly even in 1982, whereby 10.8% unemployment was reported. Additionally, in 2001 the rate of unemployment was reported to be 5.6% and increased up to 6% in 2003(Amadeo, paras 4-8). The rate of unemployment continued to escalate significantly especially during 2008 economic recession. Research indicates that an unemployment rate of 10.2% was reported on October 2008. However, on January 2008, the rate of unemployment among different groups was as follows: 7.0 percent female adults, 6.9 percent male adults, 3.2 percent Asians Amercans, 24.2% teenagers, 9.2 percent Hispanics and 13.3 percent Africans Americans. Currently, unemployement rate was reported to be 7.6 percent on March 2013.Therefore, Understanding unemployment problems is very vital not only to individuals but also to all sectors of the economy. This is because it acts as an economic indicator of whether an economy is developing or not. This may further help the US federal government to identify fiscal and monetary measures to address the problem of unemployment (Woirol, 10-15). US Unemployment Problem The reason why unemployment rate that was reported by the US government could be misleading is because the official unemployment data released by the government does not reflect the true states of affaires on the economy. This is because the rate does not include all the relevant components for computing the rate of unemployment (Hardson, para1). According to economist such as John Williams, the government reported a national unemployment rate of 7.9% and a 9.8% unemployment rate in California as at January 2013. On the contrary, unemployment rate was reported decreased up to 7.7% on March 2013, indicating a 0.2% decline in official unemployment rate (Hardson, para2-3). According to Williams this could be misleading because when making computation the national unemployment excludes the discouraged workers and include only those people have been actively looking for a job within a period of four weeks. This means those people who had given up in looking for a job are not included in unemployment figures. This consequently makes the official unemployment to be significantly lower that the actual unemployment on the ground. In above connection, other economist asserted that the official unemployment do not show any significant improvement and this could be another reason for having a misleading rate of unemployment (Hardson, paras7-10). Additionally, the government does not make reviews to the previous unem ployment rates making the official unemployment to have a significant difference from the previous unemployment rates. Connectively, gross domestic product, consumer price index and unemployment figure have been politicised by political leaders for personal gains.. This has consequently led to an increase in cases of misleading unemployment figures. Lack of full disclosure to public on with respect to which data was adjusted in coming up with unemployment rates has contributed an increase cases of misleading rates of unemployment (Hardson, paras10-22). In order to solve unemployment problems, the