Posted on 07/11/2010 7:30:59 AM PDT by IbJensen
How many Americans will never work again? Perhaps a lot. A close look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey raises some alarming questions about the prospects of significant parts of the American population.
Thirteen percent of Americans twenty-five years and over without a high school diploma were unemployed in June (down from a peak of 17.9 percent in February, but much of that decline was due to a fall in the labor force participation rate from 62.4 percent in February to 61.4 percent in June). Ten percent of workers with only a high school diploma, were unemployed in June. Workers with a Bachelor’s degree, by contrast, had an unemployment rate of only 4.5 percent that month.
For African Americans over twenty years of age, the official unemployment rate in June stood at 17 percent. Most striking, only 58 percent of African-American men over twenty are employed, compared to 67.7 percent in 2000. For white Americans over twenty, the employment-population ratio fell from 64.9 percent in 2002 to 60.2 percent in 2009, a far smaller decline. There is almost no decline for Hispanics; the employment-population ratio stayed around 68 percent between 2000 and 2009.
The data suggest that black men with a high school education or less are dropping through the cracks in the economy. Adjusting for the decline in the employment-population ratio, the true unemployment rate for African-American men probably stands close to 30 percent. That is a frightening number.
Another striking data point is the collapse of employment for labor-force entrants aged sixteen to nineteen years. Jobseekers of this age have a low educational level and seek unskilled positions. In 2000, 45 percent of this population was in the labor force, but by 2009 the level had dropped almost to 28.4 percent. While unskilled workers of all ages are having difficulty finding work, young unskilled workers are finding it even harder.
Why is this significant? Unemployment for African Americans and those with less education has always been higher than for others, but most were eventually employed. The economic crisis has only magnified the differences. That would be bad enough. As matters stand, many of these workers may never find a steady job again.
As of June, 6.4 million Americans were on unemployment for more than 27 weeks, and the average duration of unemployment doubled from sixteen weeks in early 2008 to 32 weeks in June. These figures are, for the workers we are discussing, only going to get worse. Americans without educational qualifications are suffering levels of unemployment on the scale of the Great Depression, and for them that Depression may never end.
The sectors of the economy in which workers with less educational attainment were likely to find employment will continue to shrink. Foremost among these is home construction, where recovery may be decades away. By some estimates the US faces a 40 percent oversupply of large lot family homes by 2020, as the great retirement wave of the Baby Boomers leaves empty nesters with larger homes than they require.
Another sector is state and municipal employment. A significant proportion of job losses during the next several years will include unskilled workers employed by local governments.
Why should the discrepancy between white college-educated workers and others be so great? The world economy has changed, permanently. America once enjoyed a monopoly as a destination for capital and labor. The world’s savings poured into America during the 1990s and 2000s, contributing among other things to the homebuilding boom that employed many of the unskilled.
The fall of communism in 1989 and the incorporation of many countries from what we used to call the Third World into the global economy have eroded that monopoly. It has sharply reduced the number of jobs in manufacturing, which now employs only 15 percent of the workforce, and no longer offer unskilled labor an entry-point into the labor force. Again, the end of the housing boom and the decline in public employment in the wake of the financial crisis have also closed off other sources of employment.
There are three ways the situation could evolve, and two of them are bad. The first is that the American underclass might expand drastically, with attendant social and political problems. The second is that we will revert to methods last used during the Great Depression, when the Civilian Conservation Corps employed a tenth of America’s young men, encouraging the growth of government as an employer, even though governments are bad at providing jobs and the economy cannot sustain such programs.
The third way is the restoration of an economic regime that promotes entrepreneurship. The employment situation will not improve until small businesses begin to hire. In America’s creative-destruction economy, jobs lost by big companies usually are lost forever; they are replaced by jobs created by startups. Startups created two-thirds of all new jobs in the U.S. during the past three decades. This is the only real hope for the unskilled — but small business remains dead in the water.
We simply don’t know whether the next wave of entrepreneurship—if we are able to launch it—will absorb the millions of young, less-educated men who seem lost to economic activity. I fear that something like Roosevelt’s CCC may be required, despite my conservative’s aversion to government spending. There is, after all, a good deal of infrastructure to be repaired.
I can't help but think of the phrase shouted just a few short years ago...they do the jobs Americans won't do. Public works to reteach a whole generation how to work. Because they all thought those jobs were beneath them to even consider doing. It was better to be on welfare...than pick fields, dig ditches, etc. I don't think we will see the demographic of concern...move to public works. Those who will take those jobs...are the one's who are too embarrassed to be on public assistance to begin with.
Yup. I didn’t read your comments before I posted mine, but you’ve obviously observed folks very similar to those that I see daily.
Every time I go out somewhere I see the same PERSON. Its a fat, dumpy white woman of indeterminant age who has between 1-2 kids with her, no wedding ring, and is usually telling someone else (either in person or on a cell phone) the pathetic story of her life. I have PERSON in caps because, to me, these people are interchangable. I honestly don’t remember seeing anyone (or hardly anyone) like that when I was growing up. Now such people are legion. The chance that any of them will amount to a hill of beans is nill. Welcome to the New America.
I don't get it. I try and tell my divorced friends all the positives of being alone but they are all a bunch of sad sacks.
Me? I'd be alone in the desert Georgia O'Keefe style. As long as I had the Freepers, I'd be OK. (:
The no-go moslem zones in England and France will never work here. Our cops are too tough to give up that easily.
Perpetual pitchforks and nightly car-fire riots are what Obama is all about. It's just a matter of time. But the second amendment and castle doctrine are all we need to protect ourselves.
The no-go moslem zones in England and France will never work here. Our cops are too tough to give up that easily.
Perpetual pitchforks and nightly car-fire riots are what Obama is all about. It's just a matter of time. But the second amendment and castle doctrine are all we need to protect ourselves.
I see the same people. Who found them attractive enough to father their children?
This is what 60 years of prosperity does to a once vibrant society. Truly, the social safety net has become a hammock.
When the welfare dries up...these will be the first to riot, first to plunder, and when that runs out, the first to starve....unless they challenge the one that will not be plundered.
Regardless, the end of the road is absolute.
Great minds ;-)
I heard this from a social worker maybe 15 years ago, and the problem was surely less widespread then than it has become today. But she make a point I’ll always remember, in describing these families she came into contact with where there had never been a working family member, where the kids never had seen an adult get up every day and go off to work. It shocked me then and it still does. We may be fellow Americans but I can’t imagine a culture that is more different than the one I grew up with. And I suspect that’s true for most of us here.
It remains the one aspect of our country and it’s future that gives me reason to despair. I’d like to believe that this can be turned-around, but it will take a 180 degree shift away from the Obamanation to do so. I guess that’s why I remain such a fan of Sarah Palin, who more than anyone truly believes and represents the kind of change we need. Maybe the next election will be more about that.
ROSEBURG, Ore.--The alleged rape and murder of a five-year-old Roseburg girl left some community members outraged, and one neighbor fearing her own daughter's well being.
Sahara Dwight was found unconscious early Friday morning, and died a short while later.
Dwight was allegedly killed by someone living in her own house. Sixteen-year-old Dustin Michael Wallace was charged with raping and murdering the little girl.
It's an act not just neighbors, but residents who didn't even know the girl, still can't fathom.
Jeniffer Hawkins wipes away tears thinking about what happened just a few houses down the street.
Tears not just for 5-year-old Sahara Dwight --who was allegedly raped and murdered by her mom's boyfriend's son -- but also tears for what could have happened to her own daughter, in her own neighborhood.
"It scared me really bad, knowing my daughter was over there playing," Hawkins said.
Hawkin's little girl wasn't the only one.
"We used to play on her trampoline. And she had rollerskates we used to skate on," seven-year-old Siera Summers said.
Roseburg resident Mona Bly doesn't even know the family. But she says, as a mother...
"I've been bawling my eyes out. I couldn't stop thinking about the mom, I couldn't stop thinking about the mommy."
Flowers, card, and teddy bear in hand, she hugged a family member, asking how Sahara's mom is holding up.
"She's in the same room, in the same house where her little girl was being murdered. What do you do with those emotions?"
Sahara's family packed up the house. While down the street, Hawkins was still trying to figure out her own emotions.
"Not going to let them (daughters) go to anyone's house now because you never know."
She's even planning to call a child pyschologist for her daughter.
"It's got to be traumatizing at 7-years-old to find out a friend of yours, that this happened," she said.
When you think of how tall 5-year-olds are, they need to be helped, need to be protected," Bly said.
Wallace will be charged as an adult. Those charges include aggravated murder, rape and sexual abuse.
An autopsy is scheduled for Monday.
Roseburg Neighbors and Residents React to Little Girl's Murder | KEZI]
Unemployment here is high as is the instance of meth use/manufacturing. Yet our congressman proudly labels himself "progressive" and our churches celebrated the election of a socialist/liberation theology soaked president. Cause and effect. I am so angry about the death of this little girl I didn't know.
bttt
These positions of power will be populated by Black civil rights type lawyers with huge salaries who will demand and receive even more middle-class resources to redistribute to the down trodden/unemployed.
Anything else would be racist.
“...I fear that something like Roosevelt’s CCC may be required...”
You’re right that many of the feral youth of today wouldn’t accept living in CCC camps. The only alternative therefore will be PRISON.
ROTFL
Sounds like you got dumped by an overweight white woman.
Sounds like he spends an inordinant amount of time in Walmart to me.
We do know. The next likely dot-com wave of entrepreneurship will be robotics, and this will be the end of most jobs for the left side of the bell curve. But unlike being poor in the past, being hungry and scrounging 7 days a week, today's poor are the new leisure class, with every amenity of modern life. Robotics will give socialism, for the first time in history, an endless supply of workers that don't mind having all the fruits of their labor confiscated by the state.
I am not a big government fan at all but at this point I think it might be better to have some real infrastructure work to do and offer people a choice between work or no income. Some don’t even have a concept of making their own living, the only way they might learn it is to show them a job and give them the choice.
Even if we just kept some of them busy picking up litter at least it might teach them something. It would seem to beat just giving them money to do nothing.
I think the real winner would be a return to the old poor farm concept, if you can’t make it on your own move to the farm and work for your bed and board, no cash income. I will guarantee that most people would rather take a regular job.
Thank you for sharing this story.
In my immediate area (radius of 20 miles) I recently have been seeing more and more pregnant young women who are not wearing wedding rings.
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