The Labor Department has released its employment statistics for the month of February. It shows that 295,000 new jobs were created in February. That's a significant number, especially since the size of the labor force shrunk by 178,000 in February also. Those figures combined to shrink the unemployment rate by 0.2% (from 5.7% in January to 5.5% in February). That rate is a full 1.2% lower than it was in February of 2014 (when the unemployment rate was 6.7%). It's also the lowest rate since President Bush trashed the economy in 2007.
While the rate is still too high (should be under 4% in a healthy economy), it is moving in the right direction. Unfortunately, it is not helping to improve the economy as one would expect. About 8,705,000 people remain unemployed (an undercount), wages remain stagnant for the bottom 90% of the population, and the percentage of Americans living in poverty is not shrinking -- in fact, it continues a slow growth. There are still 15% of Americans living below the poverty level, and for children the percentage is even higher -- about 21%.
Take for example Texas, the Republican's "economic miracle". That state has a lower unemployment rate than the nation as a whole, but it has a higher percentage living in poverty, including about one quarter of the children in the state. How can that be? Shouldn't more people working lower the poverty level? It would if they were being given good jobs, but that is not the case. Most of the new jobs being created, in Texas and across the nation, are low-wage jobs. And giving a person a job that pays a poverty wage ($7.25 an hour or near it) does not lift that person out of poverty.
Lowering the unemployment rate is one one factor in curing the economic woes of this nation. We also need to make sure that anyone willing to work hard at a full-time job makes a livable wage -- that would be at minimum a wage of $10,10 an hour (and $15 an hour would make even more sense). Unfortunately, the congressional Republicans have made it clear they will block any attempt to raise the minimum wage, and if fact, many of them want to abolish the minimum wage completely.
What this means is that as unemployment drops, the rich will get richer, the poor will get poorer, and the middle class will continue to watch as inflation gobbles up the buying power of their stagnant wages. And this will continue until the Republicans are voted out of power -- since their only interest seems to be in making the rich much richer.
Here are the relevant statistics for February:
DEMOGRAPHIC LOOK AT OFFICIAL UNEMPLOYMENT RATE:
Adult men...............5.2%
Adult women...............4.9%
Teenagers (16-19)...............17.1%
Whites...............4.7%
Blacks...............10.4%
Hispanics...............6.6%
Asians...............4.0%
Less than HS diploma...............8.4%
HS diploma...............5.4%
Assoc. degree (some college)...............5.1%
Bachelor's degree...............2.7%
SIZE OF THE CIVILIAN WORKFORCE:
157,002,000
OFFICIAL NUMBER OF UNEMPLOYED WORKERS:
8,705,000
OFFICIAL UNEMPLOYMENT RATE:
5.5%
NUMBER OF MARGINALLY-ATTACHED (unemployed workers not in the official count):
2,159,000
MORE REALISTIC NUMBER OF UNEMPLOYED WORKERS:
10,864,000
MORE REALISTIC UNEMPLOYMENT RATE:
6.92%
NUMBER OF UNDEREMPLOYED WORKERS (working part-time because no full-time work is available):
6,635,000
NUMBER OF UNEMPLOYED/UNDEREMPLOYED WORKERS:
17,499,000
UNEMPLOYMENT/UNDEREMPLOYMENT RATE:
11.15%
