This exposes for yet another month the Republican lie that if corporations are allowed to keep more money they will create more jobs. The corporations are swimming in record amounts of cash (trillions of dollars) and yet they are creating very few jobs (at least very few in this country).
Jobs are created by increased demand for goods and services, but the huge majority of American consumers simply don't have the money to stimulate that demand by buying -- thanks to millions of people being unemployed, depressed wages for those with jobs, cuts in public service workers (including education), and cuts in social programs. And the Republican-dominated House of Representatives still refuses to even vote on a jobs bill (even the weak jobs bill proposed by President Obama).
The Labor Department's newest unemployment statistics show that there are still 12.8 million people they count as unemployed. In addition, there are another 2.5 million people marginally-attached to the workforce. These people were not counted as unemployed, since they could not be verified as having looked for work in the last 4 weeks (and that 2.5 million is most likely a lowball number). That means there are at least 15.3 million unemployed people in this country.
Then there are another 8.2 million people who are working part-time because they cannot find a full-time job. When you add those numbers up, it shows that there are 23.5 million people in the United States who want full-time work but cannot find it. That's a huge number of unemployed people, and it is likely to take many years to cut the unemployment rate down to 5% or lower (where it should be), even if those in Congress were to get serious and pass a decent jobs bill.
Here is the demographic breakdown for unemployment in the U.S.:
Blacks...............14.1%
Hispanics...............10.3%
Whites...............7.4%
Asians...............6.2%
Adult men...............7.7%
Adult women...............7.5%
Teenagers...............23.8%
That 163,000 jobs is according to the "establishment survey," and is contradicted by the "household survey" which showed a loss of 195,000 jobs. There were actually not "more people looking for work," as the media glibly explains, since the labor force shrank by 150,000 in the period.
ReplyDeleteEven if the work force had grown the "more people looking for work" would be misleading in its implication of discouraged workers returning to the workforce, since new workers entering the work force due to population increase will increase the rate by 1/2% per month is we don't create any new jobs.
There are serious problems with the methods of reporting. The "establishment survey" interviews businesses and if the business does not respond the survey assumes that its numbers are the same as the previous period. What if it did not respond because it closed its doors and is out of business? Then obviously job losses are under-reported, because the survey assumes that all of those jobs still exist.
The government could easily take job counts from payroll tax filings, in which case they would have highly accurate and current numbers, but they don't do that because, supposedly, of "confidentiality issues." I'm not sure how revealing employee counts from those payroll tax filings would violate confidiality, and I suspect the real reason is that it would make it harder to fudge the numbers.
The gist of your post is that unemployment is a huge problem and that not only are we not doing enough about it, our leadership is not even trying, and the political conversation is not sufficiently focused on the subject, and I could not possibly agree with you more.