( - promoted by Jack's Smirking Revenge)
(The dark blue line that looks like a broken string is now.)
From the Bureau of Labor Statistics...
Nonfarm payroll employment was little changed (-36,000) in February, and the unemployment rate held at 9.7 percent.
The number of persons working part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) increased from 8.3 to 8.8 million in February, partially offsetting a large decrease in the prior month. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.
There was a little more bad news on the BLS summary table of unemployment, which showed an increase of 139,000 in the number of "discouraged workers" who have given up looking for work, between January 2010 and February 2010.
Along with the increase of 500,000 "involuntarily part-time" workers from 8.3 to 8.8 million, there was plenty of bad news, although most of the corporate media described it as "not as bad as expected," and so on.
Some economic cheerleaders also tried to blame the bad numbers on bad weather, although the BLS had taken the trouble to shoot down this excuse before it got off the ground.
In order for severe weather conditions to reduce the estimate of payroll employment, employees have to be off work for an entire pay period and not be paid for the time missed. About half of all workers in the payroll survey have a 2-week, semi-monthly, or monthly pay period.
So unless you were a day laborer, or snowed in for at least a week, your employment status didn't change, and snow won't explain away the bad news.
Even according to Obama's advisors, his economic "stimulus" has already contributed most of what they expect it to contribute to reducing unemployment.
The stimulus will continue to trickle into the economy for the next couple of years, but as a concentrated force, it's largely spent. Christina Romer, the chair of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, said last fall, "By mid-2010, fiscal stimulus will likely be contributing little to further growth," adding that she didn't expect unemployment to fall significantly until 2011.
And in the same excellent article from the Atlantic which I linked above, Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson describes some bleak consequences of long-term unemployment for black communities...
"One problem that has plagued the black community over the years is resignation," Wilson said--a self-defeating "set of beliefs about what to expect from life and how to respond," passed from parent to child. "And I think there was sort of a feeling that norms of resignation would weaken somewhat with the Obama election. But these hard economic times could reinforce some of these norms."
Wilson, age 74, is a careful scholar, who chooses his words precisely and does not seem given to overstatement. But he sounded forlorn when describing the "very bleak" future he sees for the neighborhoods that he's spent a lifetime studying. There is "no way," he told me, "that the extremely high jobless rates we're seeing won't have profound consequences for the social organization of inner-city neighborhoods."
Update: I just found this graph of long-term unemployment, which cheerleaders for Obama will probably call "encouraging."
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