Is Obama bad for blacks?
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The August jobs report was dismal for plenty of reasons, but perhaps most striking was the picture it painted of racial inequality in the job market.
Black unemployment surged to 16.7% in August, its highest level since 1984, while the unemployment rate for whites fell slightly to 8%, the Labor Department report.
"This month's numbers continue to bear out that longstanding pattern that minorities have a much more challenging time getting jobs," said Bill Rodgers, chief economist with the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.
Black unemployment has been roughly double that of whites since the government started tracking the figures in 1972.
Economists blame a variety of factors. The black workforce is younger than the white workforce, lower numbers of blacks get a college degree and many live in areas of the country that were harder hit by the recession -- all things that could lead to a higher unemployment rate.
But even excluding those factors, blacks still are hit with higher joblessness.
"Even when you compare black and white workers, same age range, same education, you still see pretty significant gaps in unemployment rates," said Algernon Austin, director of the Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy program at the Economic Policy Institute. "So I do think the fact of racial discrimination in the labor market continues to play a role."
About 155,000 blacks got jobs in August, but the group's unemployment rate still went up because those jobs weren't enough to make up for all the people who started looking for work during the month.
However, the gain for whites of 211,000 jobs was enough to bring their unemployment rate down.
Overall, black men have it the worst, with joblessness at a staggeringly high 19.1%, compared to 14.5% for black women.
Black unemployment has now remained above 10% for four straight years, and the given current economic sluggishness, some experts say it's safe to predict the rate will remain above 10% for four more years.
"Our job creation is just not happening -- certainly not at the rate necessarily to bring rapid reductions to the unemployment rate," Austin said.
Latinos saw their unemployment rate remain unchanged at 11.3% in August. Unemployment remains at 9.1% for the country as a whole.
Increase in welfare recipients:
The federal government's fiscal stimulus includes $5 billion for states where
more families receive welfare or spending increases on employment subsidies or
short-term emergency assistance. That provision sparked concerns from the
Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups that President Barack Obama
was undoing the provisions of the 1996 law intended to encourage states to get
people off welfare and onto payrolls.
Twenty-three of the 30 largest states, which account for more than 88% of the
nation's total population, see welfare caseloads above year-ago levels,
according to a survey conducted by The Wall Street Journal and the National
Conference of State Legislatures. As more people run out of unemployment
compensation, many are turning to welfare as a stopgap.
The biggest increases are in states with some of the worst jobless rates.
Oregon's count was up 27% in May from a year earlier; South Carolina's climbed
23% and California's 10% between March 2009 and March 2008. A few big states
that had seen declining welfare caseloads just a few months ago now are seeing
increases: New York is up 1.2%, Illinois 3% and Wisconsin 3.9%. Welfare rolls in
a few big states, Michigan and New Jersey among them, still are declining.
Unemployment is up and due to Obama's Stimulus more people qualify for welfare. The number of peope on welfare is higher than it has been since the 90's.
To me that means that all of us but blacks especially are worse off under Obama.
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