Last week, the Labor Department reported that youth unemployment stands at 18.2%, nearly twice the national average of 9.8%. The percentage of young people without a job is a staggering 53.4 percent, the highest figure since World War II. Looking deeper, the statistics for youth of color are terrible and telling.
According to the most recent data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 40.7% of black youth between 16-19 are unemployed, almost double the amount of whites teenagers (23%). For Latinos the same age, the rate is nearly 30%. Get a little older and the gap grows wider. Unemployment for black Americans aged 20-24 is 27.1%, over twice that faced by white youth (13.1%) in the same age range.
The glaring differences indicate that unemployment is not only decidedly raced, but also that the current economic condition is wholly unforgiving for young people of color. Only a massive, well-funded set of green jobs programs explicitly designed to close those racial gaps can create a truly vital, full-employment economy.
The April employment report is still giving me nightmares. Employment in retail trade declined by 47,000; jobs in manufacturing plummeted by 149,000; Construction employment fell by 110,000; the professional and business services industry lost 122,000 jobs.
And 66,000 Americans found work helping to prepare for the 2010 Census.
Of course, these weren't the only citizens to obtain employment last month. What's more, the new Census positions aren't even permanent. But amidst the carnage of unrelenting layoffs, there's something about those newly hired Census employees... I can't help wishing there were more of them.
I thought about the Census workers during the utterly absurd controversy over whether the Republican party would officially urge the Democrats to change their name to the "Democrat Socialist Party." If the Democrats were truly willing to think big - to be informed by the best traditions of European social democracy, or even the New Deal - the federal government would be hiring a lot more than 66,000 employees during a time of tremendous economic need.
We may not need thousands more people take the Census (although more employees might help prevent the troubling undercounts that plagued past Census efforts). But we have no shortage of other urgent public needs. The time has come to think about hiring people to address them directly, going beyond inadequate stimulus funding to launch a genuine public jobs program.
"Guaranteed public jobs paying more than the minimum wage would permanently and automatically stabilize the economy, swelling the ranks of public workers in recessions and shrinking them when private jobs become more abundant. Instead of punishing the working poor most severely in downturns, as the system does now, the government would redistribute the costs of recession so that all taxpayers would share the burden as a public obligation."
A permanent public jobs program, as Greider proposes would indeed be thinking big. But a even temporary program of sufficient scale would make an enormous difference in a broken economy. After all, the Democratic party is apparently bound to be called "socialist" regardless.
On Tuesday, Democracy Now! featured a segment, "Report: Communities of Color Bear Heaviest Burden in Recession". The title was actually a bit misleading, because the report, though taking note of the recession and the need to respond pro-actively to it, wasn't specifically limited to the effects of the recession, it was about geographical patterns of opportunity and lack of opportunity that have long persisted throughout good times and bad. And-Surprise! Surprise!-those patterns turn out to be strongly related to race. As I'll explain below, this report was remarkable to me in part because of how many different familiar threads itg brought together, in addition to the threads of the opportunity sub-indexes it brought together.
It's not bad enough that blacks suffer twice the unemployment rate of whites (with Asians and Latinos falling in between), they also suffer inferior housing, health care, and education, along with greater exposure to pollution. Indeed, the report identified six broad areas, constructing an index of indictors for each, and found similar patterns of racialized opportunity in all six of them.
It's important to realize that none of this necessarily depends on old-fashioned racism. But that doesn't make a bit of difference when it comes to the effect, which is to place disproportionate, and often debilitating burdens on minorities. (Sub-prime mortages, for example, not only were targeted disproportionately at minorities, in many cases minorities who qualified for standard financing were simply not offered the option that would have been routine, had they been white.) Furthermore, as minority populations grow, and minorities collectively come to constitute a majority, these patterns of suppressed opportunity are increasingly a problem for our society as a whole--as, indeed, was the case with the sub-prime mortgage meltdown.
It's not just a noble sentiment, it's increasingly simply a fact of life-allowing large segments of our population to be held back by substandard opportunities to advance creates mounting problems for our society as a whole. The converse is also true: effective strategies for advancement as a whole require a special focus on those who are being held back the most. That's the message behind the report, "One Region: Promoting Prosperity Across Race" [pdf]
[TOM] DELAY: Excuse me, but the economy from 2001 to 2007 was going quite well, thank you, but people were pushing especially Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae into loaning-making loans to people that couldn't afford them. That caused the housing strike (ph). And we can all go through that. But the economy most of the years of Bush was going just fine and we were fighting a war on terror in two different countries and we were keeping the homeland safe and we were not on a spending spree, like Obama is putting us on with his budget.
Economy going quite well, thank you? Er, not so much (all in constant dollars):
As can be seen above, the economic growth experienced by all income groups during the Clinton years came to a screeching halt when Bush took office. Incomes stagnated completely, all across the board. Numbers on the flip.
547,267,000 months to be more or less exact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That's how many months of work, of productivity, of income the American economy lost under George W. Bush, compared to the pace set by Bill Clinton. And we'll have another 20 million or so to add before he leaves office.
Under Bill Clinton, the US economy added 18,703,000 jobs in 96 months, for an average rate of 194,823 jobs added per month. Population growth alone required adding around 180,000 per month, so jobs increased faster than population by a modest amount.
Under George Bush, the US economy has added 6,507,000 jobs in 94 months, for an average of 69,223 jobs added per month--far below the growth rate required to keep up with population growth.
Here's a thousand words of what the difference looks like:
That's what leading progressive economist Dean Baker calls it, noting:
Senator McCain is filling the airwaves with commercials telling the public that Obama's tax increases will slow growth and cost the economy jobs. It's pretty scary stuff to anyone who takes it seriously.
This chart alone is enough to show what a load of hooey it is:
That steep ascent from 1993 to 2001 is the Clinton Adminstration, adding over 22.7 non-farm jobs to the American economy--an increase of over 20%. And after that? That uneven landscape atop the sharp Clinton rise? That's GW "Taxcut" Bush territory, with a measely 5.53 million jobs added throuhg January of this year--an increase of just over 4%.
"But wait!" you might say, "That's only seven years. Clinton had eight." And you'd be right. But since the beginning of the year, the Bush "taxcut" economy has lost over 1/2 million jobs. And this is what we're supposed to be scared to death of losing???
