If you watch Fox News, read right-wing blogs, or listen to talk radio, you might believe that the president is looking out for black people at the expense of whites. If that’s the case, he’s not particularly effective:
While unemployment among the general population is about 9.1 percent, it’s at 16.2 percent African Americans, and a bit higher still for African American males.
CBS News correspondent Michelle Miller reports that, historically, the unemployment rate for African Americans has always been higher than the national average. However, now it’s at Depression-era levels. The most recent figures show African American joblessness at 16.2 percent. For black males, it’s at 17.5 percent; And for black teens, it’s nearly 41 percent.
These are catastrophic numbers, and Washington’s focus on cutting government spending is, if anything, only going to make matters worse, as it will destroy jobs in the short-term in the hope that the economy with be healthier in the long-term.
As a family that just celebrated the high school graduation of a son last Tuesday, this is particularly frightening.
Job counselors say part of the problem is that high schools aren’t teaching marketable skills.
“Unless you have a skill coming out of high school, in this society, in this economy, you will not be able to find a job,” Johns says.
Even so, in this climate, where jobs are scarce, even having a real skill is still no guarantee of a job.
The job market is brutal. Yet, with all the focus on deficits and debt, there’s very little short-term reason for hope.
I hate to beat a dead horse, but the main reason that nothing can be done is that the Republicans are ideologically opposed to government spending to create jobs and have a blind commitment to supply-side trickle-down economics that has been discredited by experience.
As long as businesses continue to hire illegal immigrants, nothing that Obama does will change the unemployment rate for Black teens and high school grads. Practially EVERY low-paying- manaul labor- service industry-related job goes to an illegal in the area where I live. They mow the grass, remove the snow, serve me my Big Mac and check me out at WalMart. And that’s a problem not only for Blacks but for any high schooler looking for a summer, temporary or permanent job.
Like they have in most European countries, we have to create an enforcable guest-worker program in this country that has nothing to do with leading to a path to citizenship… you can come here and work for 6 months and make as much money as you want, but then you have to go back home for 6 months. Of course, without a program like this in place, our economy would collapse if we actually enforced the current immigration laws. The wine industry, for example, would literally disappear overnight since 100% of grape planting and harvesting is done by illegals.
And you know they are illegal … how?
Are you aware that McDonald’s and Walmart are required by law to check the ID and verify citizenship or valid work permit for everyone they hire? That a W-4 is required to be paid, and it in turn requires a valid SSN?
Illegal workers are going to be limited to situations where they can get around these laws. Big Ag, for example, will hire “contractors” from legally valid fly-by-night “firms” that are set up to insulate the Big Ag from the paperwork required of employers.
No, just because someone has dark skin and speaks with an accent doesn’t make them illegal, although pretty much every tea partier believes it does.
And just how long has the U.S. Gov’t been granting valid work permits to any non-English-speaking foreign applicant who wants to stock shelves at WalMart or flip burgers at McDonalds? Must be a new regulation I haven’t heard of.
Funny how any argument can be shut down by simply accusing the other side of racism.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about with either of those paragraphs. But the requirement for an employer to validate ID and SSN for anyone hired has been around since at least 2005 — it’s form I-9, by the way.
Here is a link to the SBA.gov web site that describes the process, note the step about I-9:
http://www.sba.gov/content/10-steps-hiring-your-first-employee
A lot of the opinion media talks and talks about how illegal aliens are taking all the jobs, but the reality is that illegal aliens can work only as cash-only contractors, such as private maids or garden workers. If they get work as an “employee” of a business that is willing to skirt the rules you can be sure they won’t have any of the normal protections and benefits — and that business is risking major fines.
Certainly the large American corporations like the major hotel chains, retailers, and fast food restaurants work hard for full compliance with the I-9 regulations, because the fines and bad publicity for not complying simply are not work the risk. So, again, I tell you that the people serving you at McDonalds are not illegals — they may be Latin American, may have trouble speaking English, but in some way they got a valid work permit.
But like a lot of people, you assume they are all illegal. Why?
Yes, and it will get worse by November, 2012. Unlike the 1990s there is no productivity boom. Unlike 1983 there isn’t a case of pent-up demand that was held back by high interest rates (necessary to starve out inflation). Unlike the 2000s we aren’t going to even get a weak boomlet due to financial shenanigans that created a housing bubble.
I know you’re optimistic about Obama winning in 2012 and hoping that one of the hoards of nutcases wins the GOP nomination, but we’d better start hoping for Huntsman because Obama is going to be toast. The GOP won’t even need to placate the crazies in 2012. The slogans will be so easy: “Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?”
The most effective ad they have is to excerpt the 30-minute Obama ad from 2008, in which he focused in depth on 3 families and their struggles, and compare where they were then to where they will be in 2012. The minor improvements in health care will have been offset by everything else.
Go ahead. Blame the GOP. Blame the Lieberdems. This President has no principles, no vision. He’s reversed his positions 180% on Constitutional rights, torture, and executive war powers — his areas of personal expertise. It’s not that he can’t stand up for things he believes in — just look at how hard he’s come down on whistleblowers — it’s that he doesn’t believe in anything we do.
I don’t know who “we” is supposed to be, but your final paragraph makes it clear that your first three are wishful thinking. You’re hoping enough people suffer from economic pain that that nasty Obama gets punished for it.
Root for him to lose? Nope (at least not as long as the alternative is someone just as bad). I’m wishing Obama governed in a manner similar to his campaign.
If that’s the case, then why does Obama insist on following those ideological Republicans off the cliff on tax cuts for the wealthy, cutting Social Security and Medicaid, corporate welfare, endless war, etc.?
Please stop beating that dead horse. Republicans aren’t the only problem. Of course you know that. It’s the political money that blinds both parties of the royal court to real problems of real Americans outside the beltway.
thank you.
Unlike Booman, I remember reading articles (many quite recent) about decisions made in 2009 to “pivot” to the deficit.
or is Yglesias one of the “terminally disgruntled”?
or perhaps jared bernstein is also temrinally disgruntled when he writes, “There will be no WPA-type programs in our near future. There was no appetite for them in the Obama admin in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression and there’s a lot less now. The reasons for that are interesting and I’ll speak to them another day. But it ain’t happening.”
I’m not absolving the republicans, who are obviously doing their best to bring down the country. But please: no one with any power wants to make the bankers pay for their mistakes and no one with any power wants to end the Bush tax cuts. Those people, as Booman has noted, exist in BOTH parties.
The problem being that there wasn’t a sense of real across the board crisis in 2008 to spur major bills to be written and passed in Congress.
The economy has been drifting downwards for a long time. Clinton didn’t help with NAFTA.
Obama tried to get the offshore tax reversed. No go in 2010 before the election. THat would have helped workers here.
In NJ Christie has made a real mess of the tunnel project by shutting it down and now spending tax dollars to try to prevent the Feds from takeing back the money.
It isn’t a simple matter for Obama to get a jobs program through Congress.
The Republicans have indeed blocked any effort to make things better.
The Republican goal is to make Obama and the Dems fail.
“The problem being that there wasn’t a sense of real across the board crisis in 2008 to spur major bills to be written and passed in Congress.”
Are you KIDDING me? Friend, the economy COLLAPSED. Congress was PANICKING: you must have forgotten TARP. Or how Hank Paulson showed up with a three page plan to rescue the banks. Or the way GWB appeared on tv, looking like he’d literally just shit his pants in terror, to tell us “everything just want DOWN.” To say “there wasn’t a sense of real across the board crisis in 2008” is a blatant attempt to rewrite history. here is 2007, for your review. And here is 2008:
And you say “there wasn’t a sense of real across the board crisis in 2008 to spur major bills to be written and passed in Congress”??? Tell me, what color is the sky where you live?
Finally, to repeat the president’s economic advisor: “There will be no WPA-type programs in our near future. There was no appetite for them in the Obama admin in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression and there’s a lot less now. The reasons for that are interesting and I’ll speak to them another day. But it ain’t happening.”
yes, the republicans are to blame for SO much of what’s gone on: but to lay it completely at their feet is hogwash.
Bernstein was Biden’s economic advisor.
does not undermine my point.
The slam against high schools not teaching marketable skills is unfair. First, employer’s have gone from wanting general intelligence and good work habits, training employees after they hire them to expecting a new hire to read their minds and know their system the first day on the job.
Second, transferable skills no longer are. The are baseline requirements.
Third, business taxpayers have benefited from vocational and technical training carried out by high schools but have not paid back so as to allow the upgrading and expansion of those programs. How many high schools now have the equivalent of a small textile mill spinning and weaving floor, a serious carpentry workshop, a fully equipped machine shop (including NC equipment)? High schools in South Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s had these and the relationships with employers to walk their students into jobs after graduation.
Fourth, no one is tracking the changes in marketable skills in such a way to feed that information back in a timely manner to school districts. And anyway, No Child Left Untested has taken away time that used to be devoted to building practical skills.
And this is the worst economy since the Great Depression with employers choosier and choosier.
Well said. Businesses have been pushing off training costs onto colleges and schools for years now. If that’s the way they want it and budget cutting keeps targeting the education system, we should turn all high schools into vocational schools. Parents who want their children to go to college will just have to keep a stiff upper lip.
The problem that community colleges face then will face high schools. What vocations to teach? How should funds be allocated over those vocations? What general business, sales, and entrepreneurial skills to teach?
My advice to my children was to get training in a trade as well as pursuing a high-salary profession. And get your education on your own; use colleges and other institutions to punch your tickets with the certifications you need for employment.
that’s what I hope to accomplish with mine.