It helps us to determine unemployment by sex, race, age and educational preferences and lets us know who is doing good or bad. Based on the unemployment rate measurement it gives the handicapped, disabled and sick people a chance to take advantage and receive aid in the form of welfare, health insurance coverage's because they legitimately can't work. Despite the advantages this measurement poses it does have some limitations. During the survey people who claim to be actively seeking a job even when they have little interest in finding employment are considered unemployed by the bureau, and thus eligible to receive aid from the state and federal governments through welfare checks. Because these figures are not accurately represented the state and federal government have to dish out more money towards unemployment compensation than should be and when they do this it reflects on the taxes we pay.
The first step in analyzing the effects of unemployment on the economy is by looking at how much the unemployment rate has risen over the past few years. According to the article from the Christian Science monitor "Employment growth at the moment is the lowest for any recovery since the government started keeping such statistics in 1939" (csmonitor). From another article the imail "unemployment rate hits 8-year high", the national unemployment rate has risen to 6.1 percent while the official number of unemployed U.S. workers is now 8.8 million as of September 2003. The article also states that an additional an additional 48,000 jobs have3 been lost during the month May 2003. Conversely the latest report on unemployment released on October 3rd 2003, states that for the month of September, the unemployment rate held steady at 6.1% for the first time in 8 months. Due to this, 57,00jobs outside the farm sector were created (CNNMoney). In addition to this general trend of increasing unemployment rates, the duration of unemployment also seems to be on a steady incline.