Watch the U.S. Unemployment Rate Plummet Under President Obama in One Hypnotic GIF

Impact

The Great Recession wreaked havoc on the U.S. economy, sending the unemployment rate skyrocketing to close to 10% by October of 2009

If you want to get even more granular, MetricMaps recently used county-level data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to visualize the annual unemployment rate for every county in the U.S. from 1990 to 2013. It is, as the Huffington Post put it, 24 years of America's unemployment rate in just 10 seconds:

Of course, the declining unemployment rate isn't entirely good news: A report from the conservative Heritage Foundation rightfully notes that 6.9 million fewer Americans are working or searching for work today than at the beginning of the recession. The New York Times' David Leonhardt also notes that, according to a new academic paper out of Princeton University, the unemployment rate "appears to have become less accurate over the last two decades, in part because of this rise in non-response." These are compelling problems with economic data, ones that economists and analysts alike should take seriously. 

“It’s ironic that in a year in which Republican governors are leading some of the states that are making the most progress, that they almost, without exception, are classified as having a bump in their unemployment rates,” he said in a clip circulated by the Democratic Governors Association. “Whereas states that are under Democrat governors’ control, they are all showing that their unemployment rate has dropped. And I don’t know how you account for that. Maybe there is some influence here that we don’t know about.”

Next time you hear a ridiculous theory like this from one of your friends, just show them these GIFs.