June Unemployment Rate Stays The Same

The American economy is still not producing enough jobs. Yesterday, the Labor Department released its figures for June, and it showed that only 80,000 jobs were created. That's better than a loss of jobs, but it was barely enough to cover the new people entering the workforce (if that), and it wasn't enough to bring down the national unemployment rate. The rate remains just what it was in May -- 8.2%.

Willard Mitt Romney (aka Wall Street Willie) has already started using the June statistics to try and blame the president for not creating jobs. But what you won't hear from Romney is how the Republicans have done everything in their power to block any economic improvement or job creation for the last couple of years. They hope they can now blame the economy and lack of job creation on the president, and use that to regain power in the coming election. What you won't hear from Romney (or the Republicans) is that in spite of their efforts to obstruct the president, he has managed to bring down the unemployment rate down nearly a full point in the last 10 months.

Here's how the unemployment situation stands as of the end of June. The Labor Department says there are currently 12.7 million people unemployed. Of course, they don't count those they consider marginally attached to the workforce (those who have become discouraged and not looked for work in the last four weeks). There are at least 2.5 million of these "marginally attached" workers, which brings the total number of unemployed to 15.2 million.

Then we have another 8.2 million involuntary part-time workers. These are all people who would like to have a full-time job, but have been unable to find one. Adding this to the number of unemployed people, we find that this country really needs 23.4 million jobs. It's going to take at least 250,000 to 300,000 new jobs created every month to even begin to put a dent in this country's unemployment -- and that's not going to happen as long as the Republicans are try to force budget cuts (which costs jobs) and blocking job creation programs proposed by the president.

Here are the official unemployment rates by demographic group:
Adult men...............7.8%
Adult women...............7.4%
Teenagers...............23.7%
Whites...............7.4%
Hispanics...............11.0%
Blacks...............14.4%
Asians...............6.3%