David W. Almasi:
Is 6.6 percent the best Obama is going to be able to do when it comes to job creation?
This morning, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics posted that the official unemployment rate for March was unchanged at 6.7 percent. The alternative U-6 rate that covers the total number of unemployed along with the underemployed and despondent jobseekers only “marginally attached to the labor force” was a unsettlingly high and rising 12.7 percent.
This far into the President’s tenure, with his policies in high gear and the Bush era far in the rearview mirror, it’s all Obama’s fault now.
The writing was on the wall earlier in the week when the U.S. Department of Labor announced that claims for unemployment jumped by 16,000 in March to a seasonally adjusted number of 326,000 — 9,000 more than economists had anticipated.
What about the unemployment rate among the key Obama constituencies? Once again, minority unemployment rates far outpaced white counterparts.
The Hispanic unemployment rate in March was down slightly to a still-high 7.9 percent. The overall black jobless rate rose to a shocking 12.4 percent. Among black teenagers, however, the out-of-work segment was a staggeringly unacceptable 36.1 percent (a 3.7 percent rise in just one month).
Such a high rate for black teens, an almost certain impediment for years to come as they lose out on the prospect of entry-level employment and training at a formative age, has been a largely unrecognized issue (outside of these monthly blog postings from Project 21 and among black conservative economists such as Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. The Media Research Center, in fact, logged network interest in the black employment crisis when the job numbers are announced to just ten seconds over the past year — and that was confined to two times on one network.
Yet the President gets coverage for his childish name-calling of the budget plan to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) as a “stinkburger” and “meanwich.”
Once again, Derryck Green, a member of the National Center’s Project 21 black leadership network, is naturally not cheered by any of the new unemployment numbers, nor is he excited about the size, shape and strength of the Obama recovery.
In his monthly “About Those Jobs Numbers…” commentary on the state of the recovery, Derryck notes that a lot of the ineptitude is really an expected by-product of the progressive policy agenda:
Remember the ”scariest jobs chart ever?”
It is going to be retired as soon as that red line crosses where we were when this recession started.
That might be fairly soon.
So many people have quit trying to find work.
If they all quit trying we’d be at ”zero unemployment!”
The given numbers are little more than statistics (ie. propaganda). The bureaucrats and politicians of both parties are hiding the truth behind their statistical bull-crap. The real numbers are horrendous and at 43% out of work, much worse than that of “The Great Depression”.