Unemployment Stays The Same In February

The Labor Department released its unemployment figures yesterday for the month of February and while it wasn't good news, it wasn't bad news either. The economy produced about 227,000 new jobs, but that was only a little above the amount needed to cover new workers entering the workforce and was not enough to affect the overall unemployment rate. The official government unemployment rate remained at 8.3% for the second month in a row.

That's not as bad as it was last summer (when the rate seemed to be stuck above 9%), but it is about twice as high as it should be (3% to 4% is considered "full employment" by most economists). The Republicans would like for Americans to blame the president for the high unemployment rate, but the president has proposed a jobs plan that will help to rebuild our nation's infrastructure and pump money throughout the economy. The Republicans oppose that, and the only "solution" they have is to cut taxes for the richest Americans and the corporations (even though the rich and the corporations already have more money than ever).

According to the Labor Department, there are 12.8 million people "officially" unemployed in the United States (with 5.4 million of them classified as long-term unemployed). There are another 2.6 million people defined as "marginally attached" to the workforce -- which means they are so discouraged that they haven't looked for work in the last four weeks. These people are not counted in the official unemployment figure, which means the actual number of unemployed people is more like 15.4 million (and even that is probably an undercount).

There are also about 8.1 million people who are working part-time because they have been unable to find full-time work. They would like to work full-time, but there are no full-time jobs available for them. This means our economy actually needs to create about 23.5 million new jobs -- a far cry from the slightly more than 200,000 jobs created in both of the last two months. It's time for Congress to stop trying to give the rich more money (that they don't need) and get serious about creating jobs for out-of-work Americans (which are badly needed).

Here are the unemployment percentages for the different demographic groups in the U.S.:

Adult men..........7.7%
Adult women..........7.7%
Teenagers..........23.8%
Whites..........7.3%
Blacks..........14.1%
Hispanics..........10.7%
Asians..........6.3%