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Originally Posted by Yakk
Part of the higher unemployment rate is longer and more generous unemployment benefits.
Lets say that it takes 1 year to get your job back, but your benefits run out after 4 months in the USA, or 1 year in Germany.
After 4 months, you are no longer "unemployed" in the US, you have been considered to have left the labour market. You are still unemployed in Germany.
(this is low reliability information)
As far as I'm aware, that is what is known as 'structural unemployment'.
In addition to that effect, the US military and prison system has unemployment lowering effects. An otherwise unemployable person who is in prison or in the military is either out of the market or employed. Other forms of government support don't nessicarially remove someone from the labour market or mark them as employed. The US has an unusually large prison and military population (over 2% of the US's workforce).
A lower dollar is "good", but not in a way that means "make USA wealthier".
A lower dollar means importing goods makes less sense and exporting goods makes more sense.
The interesting part here is how much of the US's debt and current-account deficit is being financed by a handful of large overseas banks, purchasing large amounts of US government bonds.
And many of those banks are talking about 'diversifying' their reserves. Which makes sense -- the current rate which they are purchasing US debt is insanely unsustainable, even in the short term.
Imagine Wal-mart prices going up 25%-50% (and Wal-mart stock going down 75%!). Imagine petrol prices hitting 3-4$. Imagine imported fruit doubling and imported cars going up 50% in price.
You can do without. You won't want to. But you can do without.
The alternative is to start investing in productivity improvements now. Educate your populance, pump out Engeneers, work on robotics to make manufacturing cheap, and start before things get bad.
Actually, the jobs will come back. You'll be forced to work to provide for Chinese workers. Every unit of work they do for you, you will do for them.
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Fairly close, yakk.
Our unemployment is figured on random polling via household surveys--not unemployment recipients.
To be considered as "unemployed" one needs to be "actively seeking work." So if one quits looking for work after two weeks, one is no longer unemployed, even if that person is pulling benefits.
Of course, people in prison, homeless (I think almost everyone I know, except ex-cons, state that homelessness is the most unemployed and in most dire straits, whereas my personal experiences lead me to say prison was worse than homelessness), and other institutionalized person artificially lower the unemployment rate.
The employment rate only counts the "civilian workforce." So no government workers or military are in that count. Marginally attached workers (people who want to work full-time, but can't because their company won't let them), seasonal workers, and people below the poverty line also don't show up in the unemployment count.
Since migrant workers aren't in the figures either, an argument can be made that sometimes figures are overestimated. But that argument is hard to maintain unless one knows whether illegal workers are making more than poverty.
I don't know the percentage of miliitary compared to population, but on any given day we incarcerate 2 million+ people--none of which are counted in unemployment figures.
I don't know, there are a lot of other factors as to why our figures are problematic but I just wanted to give you more info to back up what you didn't seem to sure about.