I know things look bleak now: President Obama's approval ratings are at their lowest point yet, and a stunningly high 94 percent of Americans doubt the stimulus bill has created any jobs whatsoever.
But history gives us strong reason to believe that "this too shall pass". Join me below the fold to see hard, quantifiable evidence from Reagan's first term that gives us every reason to be optimistic.
In the recession of Reagan's first term, the peak months of unemployment were November and December of '82, and the period of time during which unemployment was in the double digits stretched from Sept. '82 to June '83. This would be almost exactly equivalent, in the current economic cycle, to Pelosi and Reid's Congress having already had to face voters last November, not a great Election Day for us given what happened in New Jersey and Virginia (although it should be noted that even then, the Tea Partiers did manage--in the only congressional race actually held that day--to help us switch a historically red seat from red to blue!).
It's quite possible that Rahm Emanuel was crazy like a fox, and that as critics carped even at the time, the backloading of so many of the big visible infrastructure projects to this year will function as a job preservation program for Democratic members of Congress. We may even get a massive reversal of the current state of public opinion noted above the fold: people may start to link in their minds the rapidly falling unemployment rate (due only in part to the stimulus but also just to the natural economic cycle) with the visible construction jobs they see from the stimulus, and give the stimulus more credit for the boom in jobs than it deserves! (Hey, I can dream, can't I? LOL)
Even more reassuring: if you look at a graph of Reagan's Gallup job approval numbers, you'll see that as we'd expect, his nadir occurred very close to the peak of unemployment, in January '83. If the graph of unemployment rates were adjusted to show, however, not 20/20 hindsight as to actual economic conditions month by month, but the more political number (what in fact was the most current unemployment number people knew at the time from reading newspapers or watching the news), the correlation would be virtually perfect, since there is always lag time before the unemployment rate for a given month is actually known. In January '83, what people knew at that time was that in November '82, unemployment had hit its worst level yet in that cycle* and had remained at that high level in December '82. Voters did not yet know that unemployment had actually peaked at the end of '82, that it was already dropping and would continue to drop over the next few months. When that information did become publicised, Reagan's approval rating (which, we should also note, at 35% was far below any level Obama has ever reached, and we are--it appears--past the peak of unemployment in our current cycle) began to steadily rise correspondingly; and of course Reagan went on to landslide victory the following year.
So cheer up: all indications are that the job picture will continue to improve, and that by November the panic and/or dread many of us have been feeling lately will seem a distant memory.
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*Let's not forget also that since 1940, U.S. unemployment has only been in double digits twice: in '82-'83, and the last three months of 2009.