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Editorials
History offers hope on jobless front : Editorials : Oswego Ledger-Sentinel : Hometown Newspaper for Oswego and Montgomery, IllinoisHistory offers hope on jobless front
| 4/1/2010
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6,864. In case you missed the article by our reporter Matt Schury in last week's Ledger-Sentinel, that how's many people the Illinois Department of Employment Services reported as being unemployed in Kendall County in January.
The agency also calculated the county's unemployment rate at 11.6 percent, the highest since March of 1983 when it stood at 12.7 percent.
The numbers are indeed staggering, but they don't begin to tell the whole story.
Just as the development boom of the past two decades affected every local governmental and county social service agency, so is the current near-record unemployment rate.
And while those who are out of work struggle to find new employment and somehow pay their bills, those who have survived job cuts at work are likely finding they have to do more with less help.
History, however, offers some cause for hope for the local unemployed and our nation as a whole. Time and again our nation has experienced economic downturns, but has always rebounded.
Just one example: Back in 1983 the nation was suffering through what many called the "Reagan Recession." In March of that year when unemployment in Kendall County reached 12.7 percent, the incumbent president's approval rating hovered in the mid-30s-just about where Richard Nixon's ratings stood when he resigned in disgrace in August of 1974. But a combination of deficit spending by the federal government and a lowering of interest rates served to spur an economic rebound by 1984-just in time to improve Reagan's ratings and assure his re-election to a second term. By the late 1980s, homebuilders had returned to Oswego and Montgomery and the development boom the area experienced through the fall of 2008 had begun.
Today, the Reagan Recession is a distant memory for most Americans, but it serves as a reminder that the nation's economy can turn around fairly quickly.
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