The Obama Administration is putting the best face on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) recent March 2010 jobless numbers report, touting the steady nationwide jobless number of 9.7%. But for minorities, the news is bad and getting worse.
The really bad news is buried in the middle of the 38 page report. The BLS data reveals an alarming and growing divergence between the number of white and the number of minorities that are unemployed. Worse yet, it is clear that minorities, especially African Americans, are falling further behind. If unchecked, the long term implications of that imbalance are nightmarish for the nation.
Larry Summers and others in the Administration have not yet shown much interest in the appalling unemployment rates for minorities and, instead, exude childlike enthusiasm at the nation’s overall jobless rate that held steady for the 2nd consecutive month.
While the unemployment for white Americans averaged 9.3%, African Americans averaged 16.6%, just a little less than double the rate of white unemployment. Hispanic Americans reported 13.3% unemployment, while recent, young veterans are averaging 14.7%. Black men, over 20 years old, are showing 20.2% unemployment and teenaged, African Americans, ages 16-19, of both sexes, show a mind-boggling 39.3% unemployed. Hispanic teens also report a staggering 30.3% unemployment. The long-term repercussions of these unemployment numbers are troubling, yet the Administration is curiously silent.
Team Obama has spent trillions of dollars and enormous political capital advancing stimulus plans and other empty calorie policies that have failed to spark employment, especially among minorities. Instead, Obama’s policies have only further eroded American competitiveness, hindered job creation. African Americans, Hispanics and other minorities, are finding themselves out of work, for longer and longer periods of time.
Soon, Congress and the President are going to have to face the growing realization that unemployment rates have been so elevated for so long among minorities that minorities in the U.S. are now on the precipice of permanent unemployment.
We need to start asking ourselves: when do the temporary wards of the state, the unemployed, become permanent wards? Is the presence in the United States of a permanent, non-working class, comprised predominantly of minorities, the change that Obama promised? What does this shift mean to us as a nation, where there is a strong likelihood that a growing majority of white citizens will be working and a growing majority of minority citizens, such as African Americans, will not?
It seems rather clear that without a job, and with little hope of finding one, the end result is that those minorities may become increasingly dependent on government entitlements.
What is especially troubling about Team Obama, is that they do not yet seem to be thinking about solutions to these problems. Instead, they exhibit a keen desire to maintain the fantasy that recovery is just around the corner, and the nation will soon return to a period of full employment. But, most likely, those days are gone.
What Congress and Obama have yet to fully grasp is that they have expanded the social safety net and further extended entitlements but at a cost of diminished entrepreneurial energies, less job creation, and potentially, permanently higher unemployment rates.
Young men and women with no job, and little hope of finding a job, represent a strain on the social fabric of the nation as they become angry and resentful over the lack of employment opportunities. They will need, and demand, additional aid and support from the government, so social spending is likely to only grow.
These new social costs will require even higher taxes to pay for all of the new programs, so our nation can probably expect rising social tensions from the mostly white Americans that will be asked to pay higher taxes to support the many new forms of government spending and more expansive entitlements and social spending.
The consequences of a growing and prolonged unemployment within the minority community, combined with preferential legislation, create a dangerous racial cocktail of time, idleness and increased expectation of entitlements. As a result, the things that divide us as a nation will likely grow.
How sad that a likely result of Obama administration policies may be that the steady improvement of race issues over the past 60 years could come to an end.
There is a growing likelihood that, with significantly more white Americans having jobs and paying taxes than African Americans or Hispanic Americans, anger over bearing an unduly heavy tax burden may be perceived as racism when it’s nothing of the sort.
Racial tensions may grow and resentments may fester, as a large group of young minorities become permanently underemployed. George W. Bush, several years ago, kicked off a heated debate with his notion of the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” Who could have foreseen that the unintended consequences of President Obama’s “audacity of change” would be a different sort of bigotry that could increase national racial tensions based upon no expectations and a permanent dependency upon the federal government?
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