A factor that I don't think anyone has looked into is the fact that the total number of people in the labor force (employed and unemployed together) has gone up steadily as time goes by. This means, obviously, that new jobs have to be constantly created to meet this demand to maintain a steady percentage of employed people.

Not many people know that in November of 2003, more people had jobs in America than at any time since 1948: 138,533,000. Unfortunately, the labor force was also the largest too: 147,187,000.

We supposedly lost two to three million jobs. I wondered where they went.

The answer: We added three million new workers* since Bush was inaugurated, and only about 690,000 jobs. Bingo: we "lost" 2.3 million jobs. The jobs didn't go anywhere, we just couldn't hire the new workers fast enough.

In the heyday of the dot.com boom, the end of 2000, the unemployment rate was 3.9 percent. This was 137,632,000 jobs vs. a labor force of 143,273,000.

Just for fun, what would we have for an unemployment rate if we compared the current peak level of jobs with the 2000 level of available workers? (Answer? 3.3 percent) Neither here nor there, I suppose. But brings a bit of perspective to the picture.

Statistics fished from here.

*Would be interesting to find out how many of these are immigrants. My rough estimates are that about half the population increase in a given year is due to immigration. See this table.