Are you better off than you were a year ago? 28 States Say No.

The WSJ Economics Blog, discussing June 2010 unemployment rates by state, uses the headline “Most Regions Show Improvement“*

I suppose we should be encouraged by the headline and not look at the text:

Washington, DC and 16 states recorded jobless rates in excess of 10%. North and South Dakota continued to have the lowest rates in the country, at 3.6% and 4.5%, respectively.

Despite the improvements in the jobless rates, 27 states posted a decline in payroll employment, while 21 notched increases. Montana and Alaska had the highest percentage increase from the previous month, while New Mexico and Nevada reported the largest percentage drops. [emphasis mine]

Less money is being paid in a majority of states. The clearest explanation, then, remains that the “decline” in U-3 reflects people dropping out of the work force, not being employed.

It gets more interesting if you look at the Year-on-Year Change. There, 28 of the 50 states show a U-3 unemployment rate that is higher than or equal to last year’s. (The District of Columbia’s U-3 rate declined by 0.1% over that time, so it is only 10.0% now.)

And the improvements are, lest we forget, from a high plateau. The 14 states with the greatest drop in their unemployment rate year-on-year have an average current rate of 8.4%—and a median rate of 8.95%, the average being skewed by the above-mentioned North Dakota, with it’s 9.3 people per square mile and total population under 650,000, 37% of which are not of working age.

Dropping North Dakota from the “biggest YoY winners” moves the median current unemployment rate to 10.0%, while the average is slightly above 8.75%.

If this is a recovery, then my December 2009 prediction that this will turn out to be a “cursive-zed” recession may turn out to be optimism.

*Also, “Jobless Rates Drop in Most States.”