Credit: The Federalist
This morning the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its latest jobs report. And hooray – unemployment is down to 6.3%! That’s a good thing, right? Well, the real problem here is that more than 800,000 Americans have left the job market – bringing the total participation number down to 62.8 from 66% in September 2008. Further, the net number of Americans employed actually fell by 73,000 last month.
Investors’ Business Daily put the 288,000 jobs created last month in context:
“The U.S. added 288,000 jobs in April, the Labor Department reported Friday, the best gain in more than two years. But nonfarm payrolls are still below their January 2008 peak, underscoring just how sluggish the recovery has been and how much slack remains in the labor market.
At 75 months, this is the longest jobs recession since World War II. The next closest was the 48-month jobs slump during and after the 2001 economic recession.”
And, this recession hasn’t spared Colorado. Just yesterday, nonprofit organization Regeneration Colorado released a report on jobs and the economy and the next generation that highlighted that Colorado’s unemployment among 20-24 year olds was the second worst in the region in 2013. Here is what the report said:
“With a total average unemployment for 2013 of 6.6% among the general population, and 11.7% among those aged 20 to 24, the unemployment in Colorado is generally better than the national average. But, there is little to celebrate. The only neighboring state whose young workers have fared worse than Colorado is Arizona.”