Then again, it’s not like anyone was expecting it.
(CNSNews.com) – The Congressional Budget Office is now projecting that the U.S. economy will never achieve full employment during the eight years Barack Obama serves as president.
That would make Obama the only American president during the post-World War II era who never presided over a year in which the U.S. economy offered full employment to the American people.
The CBO defines “full employment” to be when the national unemployment rate is at or below what it calls the “natural unemployment rate.”
The natural unemployment rate, according to CBO, is the “rate of unemployment arising from all sources except fluctuations in aggregate demand. Those sources include frictional unemployment, which is associated with normal turnover of jobs, and structural unemployment, which includes unemployment caused by mismatches between the skills of available workers and the skills necessary to fill vacant positions and unemployment caused when wages exceed their market-clearing levels because of institutional factors, such as legal minimum wages, the presence of unions, social conventions, or wage-setting practices by employers that are intended to increase workers’ morale and effort.”