10 Yr History of US Unemployment: Step Plot

Data

This plot uses the us_unemp data frame of the gcubed package. This data frame contains unemployment rates for the United States published by the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. Rates are published monthly.

library(gcubed)
head(us_unemp)

## # A tibble: 6 x 2
##   Date        Rate
##   <date>     <dbl>
## 1 2009-08-01   9.6
## 2 2009-09-01   9.8
## 3 2009-10-01  10  
## 4 2009-11-01   9.9
## 5 2009-12-01   9.9
## 6 2010-01-01   9.8

Code for plot

This plot uses the geom_step geometry to get a step function appearance as opposed to the look of using geom_line.

library(ggplot2)

unemp_step_plt <- ggplot(us_unemp, aes(x = Date, y = Rate)) + geom_step() + 
  ggtitle("10 Year History of US Unemployment Rates (2009 - 2019)")
  
  
unemp_step_plt