The great DeLorean.
Harvard's Ken Rogoff commented to us recently that when you're in the middle of a recession, it never seems like it will end. We pulled up this story from the New York Times in 1983. Unemployment had risen to 10.8%.
Today's figures showed the impact of a recession that is now the longest since World War II. The average unemployment rate for 1982 was 9.7 percent, the highest since 1941. For December, 12,036,000 people were out of work, up slightly from November and the most since 1933. There were 99,093,000 people working, down just slightly from November.
The number of discouraged workers, people who have given up looking for jobs, reached 1.8 million, the most since the Government began compiling the statistic in 1967. And the average period a worker was jobless edged up to 18 weeks, the longest since the 1940's.
New Calls for Jobs Bill
The unemployment rates in New York City, New York State and New Jersey declined for the month. (Page 25.) The 10.8 national percent rate for December, the highest since 1940, reignited calls for special jobs legislation on Capitol Hill. ''The time for crossing our fingers and waiting for a recovery is over,'' Thomas P. O'Neill Jr., the Speaker of the House, said in a statement that called for President Reagan to drop his opposition to the legislation. The President reaffirmed his opposition to such jobs bills at his news conference this week.
"It is still too high,'' Larry Speakes, the deputy White House Press secretary, said in comments on the unemployment numbers. ''The Administration is making every effort to see that it comes down. We anticipate it coming down in the coming year and we continue to work toward that end.''
Unemployment did finally drop the next year, pretty quickly. You can take a look at the numbers here, just plug in the years you want to see.
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