The unemployment rate for those 16-24, not counting students, is now 52.2%, higher than it's ever been in history.
Dead end kids
millions of Americans are staring at the likelihood that their lifetime earning potential will be diminished and, combined with the predicted slow economic recovery, their transition into productive members of society could be put on hold for an extended period of time.
And worse, without a clear economic recovery plan aimed at creating entry-level jobs, the odds of many of these young adults -- aged 16 to 24, excluding students -- getting a job and moving out of their parents' houses are long. Young workers have been among the hardest hit during the current recession -- in which a total of 9.5 million jobs have been lost.
With no one in the current administration, at the senior level anyway, with any experience in starting and growing a small business, there are no plans or tax credits to encourage small business to hire the young unemployed.
Al Angrisani, the former assistant Labor Department secretary under President Reagan, said last week,
"There is no assistance provided for the development of job growth through small businesses, which create 70 percent of the jobs in the country. All those [unemployed young people] should be getting hired by small businesses."
John Gordon points out that the minimum wage has increased 40% since 2006.
A small-business owner with 10 minimum-wage employees in 2006 could have hired another four with the wage increase he has been forced to pay to the ones he already had. So, of course, many of them didn’t hire anybody.
The evidence that minimum-wage laws work against, not for, the interests of the unskilled is pretty clear. There are, for instance, 13 states, ranging from California to New England, with minimum wages above the federal level. Their unemployment rates among the unskilled average higher than the national unemployment rate. That’s unlikely to be a coincidence.
The biggest backer of a higher minimum wage has long been Big Labor, few of whose workers are paid the minimum wage. But many of their workers are paid wages that are multiples of the minimum wage, so any increase in the minimum boosts their wages as well.
The 52.2% figure has been found false. He was referring to the employment-population ratio, which is actually a ratio of the employed (i.e. 52.2% of 18-24s are employed). The unemployment rate of that group, which considers who is actually looking for work in its calculation, is still high -- 18.5% -- but not as bad as the numbers show.
Posted by: mattbg at September 29, 2009 9:43 AM