Thread: U.S. Youth Face 52.2% Unemployment Rate

The dead end kids

Young, unemployed and facing tough future

By RICHARD WILNER

Last Updated: 4:45 AM, September 27, 2009
Posted: 1:34 AM, September 27, 2009

The unemployment rate for young Americans has exploded to 52.2 percent -- a post-World War II high, according to the Labor Dept. -- meaning 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.

"It's an extremely dire situation in the short run," said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute. "This group won't do as well as their parents unless the jobs situation changes."

Al Angrisani, the former assistant Labor Department secretary under President Reagan, doesn't see a turnaround in the jobs picture for entry-level workers and places the blame squarely on the Obama administration and the construction of its stimulus bill.

"There is no assistance provided for the development of job growth through small businesses, which create 70 percent of the jobs in the country," Angrisani said in an interview last week. "All those [unemployed young people] should be getting hired by small businesses."

There are six million small businesses in the country, those that employ less than 100 people, and a jobs stimulus bill should include tax credits to give incentives to those businesses to hire people, the former Labor official said.

"If each of the businesses hired just one person, we would go a long way in growing ourselves back to where we were before the recession," Angrisani noted.

During previous recessions, in the early '80s, early '90s and after Sept. 11, 2001, unemployment among 16-to-24 year olds never went above 50 percent. Except after 9/11, jobs growth followed within two years.

A much slower recovery is forecast today. Shierholz believes it could take four or five years to ramp up jobs again.

A study from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a government database, said the damage to a new career by a recession can last 15 years. And if young Americans are not working and becoming productive members of society, they are less likely to make major purchases -- from cars to homes -- thus putting the US economy further behind the eight ball.

Angrisani said he believes that Obama's economic team, led by Larry Summers, has a blind spot for small business because no senior member of the team -- dominated by academics and veterans of big business -- has ever started and grown a business.

"The Reagan administration had people who knew of small business," he said.

"They should carve out $100 billion right now and create something like $5,000 to $6,000 job credits that would drive the hiring of young, idled workers by small business."

Angrisani said the stimulus money going to extending unemployment benefits is like a narcotic that is keeping the unemployed content -- but doing little to get them jobs.

Labor Dept. statistics also show that the number of chronically unemployed -- those without a job for 27 weeks or more -- has also hit a post-WWII high.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/t ... _kids_Anwa

Angrisani said the stimulus money going to extending unemployment benefits is like a narcotic that is keeping the unemployed content -- but doing little to get them jobs.

......and when that runs out all hell will break loose.

Yeah, we need more guest workers (legal or not) to compete with the American citizens. And, drop an anchor baby or ten, and you live so well that you can send money that should be purchasing our goods out of the country. The kids who are bi-lingual (meaning Spanish and English only these days) will undoubtedly get preference in some fast food joint. That first job is such a sense of pride, and for these kids it would be a big boost to them feeling they will be a worthy part of society in years to come.

Hmmmmmmmm, if a good portion of the population got together and wrote a song about Obama ( not Gov't mandated) I'm sure it would include lots of expletives. Obama and his Czar-force and hijacked Democrats have taken away our children's future.

Like any Communist country, even if jobs were available most people will not work hard or strive to succeed because all of their money will be siphoned away from them to support a greedy, self-serving Gov't and their elites.

I've been saying our government is selling our children down the river for 15 years. They promote immigrants going to our colleges and getting jobs after they graduate. They go to other countries and encourage them to come here on our money. They keep saying we need illegals for the jobs Americans won't do. When I was growing up students worked in restaurants and hotels (as did a lot of mother's I knew) for money to get them school and add to the family budget woes.

Now we are seeing the result of all this helping of the illegal and legal immigrant over our own citizens. I don't have anything against immigration, but when you use it against our own citizens then I have a definite problem. This should just be a numbers game, not a cheap labor game. Either we need more people to fill gaps or we don't. It should not just be about cheap, cheap, cheap.

People sit around and wonder why the youth of today don't know how to work, are committing suicide at a crazy rate and gravitate to drugs. THEY HAVE NO FUTURE!

Our government gave it away to big business and special interest groups.

Young people have been lured to think that just getting a college degree can open the door to a good paying, indoors job. This would only happen with an ever expanding pool of cheap labor to do the manual tasks. Those low level jobs should be redeveloped into higher skilled opportunities or replaced with automation.

That is how our economy has functioned in the past. Groups like UFW have manipulated the legal system and held back the march of progress. They didn't want the farmworker jobs to disappear. But look at how many bank teller jobs, phone operator or even printing jobs have been disappearing. That's progress.