Available under Creative Commons-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
One of the stated goals of monetary policy is maximum employment. The unemployment rate statistics are collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and like the PCE price index are used as a barometer of the nation's economic health, and thus as a measure of the success of an administration's economic policies. Since 1980, both parties have made progressive changes in the basis for calculating unemployment, so that the numbers now quoted cannot be compared directly to the corresponding rates from earlier administrations, or to the rest of the world 1.
Figure 3.19
United States unemployment rates 1975–2010 showing variance between the fifty states
- 1005 reads
