| The Bureau of Labor Statistics published a new map this week. Using color codes of black and dark purple, it paints a grim picture of average annual unemployment at the county level all across the United States. It is a frightening picture of the gravest recession since the Great Depression.
How bad is it? Click here to check out this map before reading on.
If full employment is defined as four percent, then only nine counties east of the Mississippi River that fit that definition. Two counties west of the Rocky Mountains qualify; one in eastern Washington State and the other covers the North Slope of Alaska.
The bright spots of full employment can be found in the agricultural counties of the Great Plains. Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas seem immune to the wave of persistent joblessness, at least for now.
Counties in the middle, the red zone - 5.0 to 5.9 percent average annual unemployment according the BLS map - are hard to find on this map. Wisconsin and Florida have three such counties; Mississippi, Alabama and Pennsylvania have two; New York, Illinois, Maine and North Carolina have one each; Oregon, California, Arizona, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina have none.
As scary and depressing as this map is, it is not the full picture. The heaviest lay-offs came after the presidential election last year. So this map almost certainly will turn even darker over the next three months.
And yet, the Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly unemployment rate which now stands at 9.8 percent does not capture the depths of America's jobs crisis. Other BLS statistics do.
When that 9.8 percent unemployment rate was announced last Friday, the BLS press release contained three tables that told the rest of the story. Table A-1 indicated that 15.14 million Americans were unemployed. Table A-5 reported that 9.18 million Americans were working part-time involuntarily - employers had cut their hours or had furloughed them. Table A-13 noted that 5.65 million Americans had looked for a job in the last year but could not find one. What Table A-13 did not explain was that 998,000 Americans had vanished from that category since May, 2009. That adds up to 30.96 million Americans either unemployed or underemployed right now, or almost a fifth of our workforce (a note: unemployment peaked at 25% in the Great Depression).
How does our economy recover with that many people out of work or with considerably less disposable income than they are used to? How does the foreclosure crisis, and therefore housing prices, get better? I know the banks are doing great, and that will eventually trickle down to the rest of us, but in that long a run, we will definitely all be dead.
And since I'm a Democratic political consultant, I also need to point out there are a few political implications to all this. I am thrilled that my beloved home state of Nebraska, and the beautiful states of Kansas, North and South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana are still doing fairly well. But just to point out to my friends in Congress and the White House: not much in the way of swing or Democratic states or congressional districts in that grouping of states. The darkest states on that map are states like Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, Virginia, Indiana, North Carolina, Missouri, Wisconsin. If those states sound familiar to you political junkies, it's because those were some of the closest states in the country in last year's election.
We need to an all-out, big, bold jobs program coming from the President and Democrats in Congress. The little ideas being mentioned right now in articles like these- extending unemployment, tinkering with some business tax incentives- will not create jobs on anywhere the scale that is needed. We need a big bold jobs bill, and we need it to come immediately after we get done with health care. |
