I’m sitting here this morning watching The Today Show and Matt Lauer is talking about The Misery Index and how it’s at it’s highest point right now than what it’s been since Bill Clinton took office. I’m like, what in the world is this Misery Index and why have I never heard this term before? So, I did what I always do when I hear or read about something that I don’t know about, I Googled it! LOL
What I came up with was an actual website that shows The United States Misery Index and it goes all the way back to 1948 through the current year. Now, for those of you that are as clueless as am I as to what I’m talking about, the misery index in the US is decided by adding the unemployment rate and the rate of inflation. For instance, the current unemployment rate in the US is 5.5% and the current rate of inflation in the US is 4.18%, which means the current misery index in the US is 9.68.
Now, if we look at the misery index comparison on this page which goes all the way back to 1948, the last time the misery index was higher than 9.68% was in 1993, the year that Bill Clinton took office. During the four years that George Bush Sr. was in office the misery index never went below 10.09%, during the 8 years that Ronald Reagan was in office we started out with a misery index of 17.97% in 1981, it went to it’s lowest rating in 1986 which was 8.91%, then peaked up a bit by the end of his term in 1988 to 9.57%.
In defense of the current President Bush the lowest misery index we’ve had since he took office was in 2002 when it was 7.37% and it honestly hasn’t fluctuated very much during his years in office.
The lowest that the misery index has ever been since 1948 was 3.74% in 1953 when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president and the highest it has ever been was 20.76% in 1980, the last year that Jimmy Carter was President.
Anyway, that is a very interesting website, you can go as far as to see the different ratings on a monthly basis over the last 60 years. So take the time to check it out and maybe even learn something new today, like I did!
