By Jonathan Davis | TrendingPolitics
For most of former President Donald Trump’s
term, unemployment for all demographics fell to a point where, pre-pandemic,
the rate was so low that many economists estimated that the U.S. was at full
employment.
But what Trump managed to accomplish that
none of his most recent predecessors managed was to lower the employment rates
for black and Hispanic Americans to historic levels, which he touted often in
speeches and on the 2020 campaign trail.
Fast-forward to the present day: Despite the
vast majority of the country having shed pandemic restrictions which created
millions of job openings, unemployment for blacks has shot up again under
President Joe Biden, a phenomenon which is undermining his pledge to leave no
Americans behind, "Just The News" reported Monday [and just like Biden left Americans behind enemy lines in Afghanistan].
“The rise in black unemployment in August is
certainly troubling, considering their unemployment rates were already much
higher than any other group,” Elise Gould, a senior economist at the
Economic Policy Institute, noted on Twitter.
Blacks also recorded lower levels of poverty
under Trump, Just The News noted.
One economist who served as an adviser to
Trump, Stephen Moore, said that economic and employment trend lines for blacks
under Biden are ominous, especially given all of the congressionally approved
COVID-19 relief that was doled out.
“It doesn’t matter how much free money Biden
passes out to people. There can be no black economic progress in households
with no one working,” he said.
“Overall, the U.S. jobless rate in August fell from 5.4% to 5.2%. But for blacks, it rose from 8.2% to 8.8%, a 7% spike in a single month,” Just The News reported, adding: “To put that number in perspective, black joblessness had reached an all-time low of 5.4% in the report that came out in November 2019, just before the pandemic.”
The analysis noted that much of the media’s
focus on the August jobs report showing much smaller gains than projected, but
for Biden, the more impactful data is likely to be the declining employment
figures for blacks, especially if that is allowed to continue.
“Black workers are often first to be fired
and last to be rehired, so if the recovery slows we might expect to see that
the impact is more on black workers,” Daniel Zhao, a senior economist with
Glassdoor, told Reuters Friday.
“That figure on its own creates tough optics
for the Fed as it approaches a consequential meeting this month, especially as
other data from the Labor Department suggest the Black employment recovery from
last year’s recession continues to progress – by some measures more so than for
whites,” the newswire service noted.
While Reuters noted that blacks had made some
decent gains lately, the situation was far less than ideal.
“After last month’s increase, the jobless
rate for Black workers is still at crisis-era levels and is down just 0.4
percentage points from the start of the year. The unemployment rate for white
workers, at 4.5%, is below the national unemployment rate and down by 1.2
percentage points from January,” the news agency said.
In October 2019, near the pinnacle of the
Trump economy, CNBC reported that black and Hispanic unemployment levels
were at record lows.
“The jobless rate for Hispanics hit a record
low of 3.9% in September, while African Americans maintained its lowest rate
ever, 5.5%,” the network reported, adding: “There have never been more Black
and Hispanic Americans in the workforce.”
