Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Who Can They Blame?

The unemployment numbers for July recently came out and - good news! - unemployment dropped to 7.4%, lower than expected (at least until it's quietly revised upward in a few weeks). Unfortunately, the news is not so good after all. Unemployment is down because the number of people looking for work is down. If the labor participation rate were what it was in January of 2009 unemployment would be at 10.7%.

Just as bad is that the vast majority of jobs created were part-time jobs. Erika Johnson has the numbers and analysis at Hot Air.

After five years of progressive governance the economy is still virtually stagnant at 1.7% growth. I guess this doesn't matter much if you're already employed full-time and have some income security, but I feel very sorry for those young people who are graduating from college burdened with a ton of debt and unable to find a job in their field, or any decent job at all.

I suppose someone might say that these students are a core constituency of the folks responsible for our economic malaise, and I guess they are. It could be argued, too, that many other students were too apathetic or too busy to invest in educating themselves about what was at stake in the last two elections and didn't vote. All true. Young people, as a whole, have themselves to blame for their predicament just as much as the derelictions and incompetence of our political leadership.

Even so, I feel very sorry for them. For many of these kids the future, at least until we stop electing liberal progressives to office, is very bleak. Maybe by 2014 and 2016 they'll care about more than who's most "cool" and which candidate has the most charisma. Perhaps they'll be sophisticated enough not to be taken in by silly rhetoric about "green jobs" and "wars on women," and vote instead for the candidate who'll institute policies that'll restore the nation's economic virility. Heaven help us, and especially them, if they don't.