A Look at Unemployment

Here's a chart of the historical unemployment rate from FRED (the Federal Reserve Economic Data service):

Two observations:

First, the absolute best time to be entering the labor force in the last 40 years was right before 2000, when the unemployment rate hit a low of 3.8% in April of that year.

Second, the unemployment rate increased between 2 to 4 percent during each of the recession periods in the graph, with the current increase at already 2.3% since March of 2007.