Black unemployment rate rising under Trump!

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File Under: What have you done for me lately?

the uncounted unemployed on LA's skid row

US President Donald Trump is fond of bragging about how he has presided over the lowest black unemployment rate in history, and if you limit history to the period covered by US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports [1972-2018], and exclude slavery, he has a point. In May 2018, the 'Seasonally Adjusted Black or African American Unemployment Rate' hit an all time low of 5.9%.

But it has started rising again in the months since then. In June, it jumped up 0.6%, a rise of more 10% in one month, for a black unemployment rate of 6.5%, and in July it ticked up again to 6.6%.

Seasonally Adjusted Black or African American Unemployment Rate'

While two months rising does not a trend line make, and we don't know how August will look, this may be an important stat to watch as the midterms approach, and Trump steps up his hypocritical claims about how good he has been for black people. The overall unemployment rate was 3.8% in May, it rose to 4.0% in June, before coming back down a bit to 3.9% in July. This makes the delta between the rise of the black unemployment rate and the general unemployment rate very troubling in this most recent period, because while the general unemployment rate rose a negligible 0.1% between May and July, the black unemployment rate rose 0.7%. That means that in this most recent period, the black unemployment rate has been increasing at more than seven times that of the white unemployment rate.

This delta will be important to watch going forward because the claim of the "Trump economy" is that if he is successful in raising the yachts, he will be raising the little boats as well, including black ones, because racism is no longer a problem{if it ever was}.

It is true that black Americans share in a growing economy, albeit, at a lower rate than whites. It is also true that what could be called the "Trump racist revival" is introducing a counter trend. Along with the increased vilification, voter suppression, and criminalization of black people in Trump's America, now that racists feel more comfortable in acting out their racism, can we expect more discrimination in employment? If even a handful of capitalists who would like to discriminate think they can get away with it now, with Trump in the White House, and Jeff Sessions heading the Justice department, we can expect this delta to start showing up in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Is that what we are starting to see here?

While Trump likes to date the start of the "Trump economy," not just from the date of his inauguration, when he started exercising power, but from the date of his election, claiming just the knowledge that he was headed for the White House caused a major turn around! Trump may think he has near magical powers over the US economy, but in reality it doesn't work that way. The US economy is like a big ship, perhaps the biggest of all. Being a capitalist economy, it is prone to crisis and doesn't steer easily at all. A president has rather limited levers of control, and generally they are slow to operate and may take years to have an effect. [Not to mention, the unemployment rate is a lagging indicator.]

For example, Barack Obama inherited the economic crisis of 2008, when many thought we would soon have to start numbering our Great Depressions the way we have come to number our Great Wars. Three months into his presidency, the national unemployment rate stood at 9.0%, before peaking at 10.0% in October 2009. Black unemployment stood at 15.8% then, but continued to rise, peaking at 16.8% in March 2010. Now, Obama can hardly be blamed for the unemployment rate on the date he took office, but he can say that things started to turn around after his policies started to have an effect.

Unemployment Rate (seasonally adjusted)

As the Bureau's own graph shows, what Trump is bragging about represents the continuation of a downward trend in the overall unemployment rate that started under President Obama in the beginning of 2011. Trump can claim to not run it aground, or hit an iceberg, yet! But his crazy economic policies, like his tax cut for the rich, and tariffs policies developed on a whim, haven't had a chance to have much effect....yet. It remains to be seen what the effects of the "Trump economy" will be of the living standard of all workers, especially those that are last to be hired.

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