Books, movies, politics, and whatever I want

Archive for July 15th, 2014

Time to review some numbers

Tuesday, July 15th, 2014

Let’s start with the BLS unemployment numbers.

The U3 number for June 2014 was 6.1%. Now if you were paying attention, you would know that there was a net gain of over 200,000 jobs in June.  Which is generally a good thing, since it was about double what is needed to just offset population growth.  Anemic growth by other recovery standards, but pretty damn good in the Obama economy.  If you were paying attention to the details, you wouldn’t be popping the corks on the bubbly yet.  Those 200,000 new jobs were part of the 700,000 new part time jobs, offset by a loss of 500,000 full time jobs.  Yup, in the Obama economy, full time work with benefits is out, and wearing a name tag and asking, “Would you like fries with that?” is in.

It gets worse for minorities.  They key democrat voting blocks of blacks, hispanics, and the ‘youth vote’ have gotten the nasty end of the shafting in the Obama economy.  These are the official government June unemployment numbers from the BLS.  Look ’em up if you don’t believe ’em.

Hispanics: 7.8%

Blacks: 10.7%

Aged 16-19: 21.0%

You know that the overall 6.1% number is only so low because the feds have stopping counting more and more of the long term unemployed. “Not in the labor” force is at 92.2 million and still climbing.  If they were added back in, that number would be comfortably in the double digits.  So inflate the minority numbers by the same factor and you have 2 out of ten black Americans out of work.

Compare and contrast to the Reagan Recovery, where unemployment for minorities when down and their net income went up. To be honest, unemployment was down and net income was up for everyone.  That is what you get when you have an economic policy geared for growth, rather than ‘income distribution.”