Good news – the unemployment rate is dropping, last month from 9 percent to 8.9 percent a scant drop. Better news – the private sector is finally generating jobs, 192,000 to be exact, last month. Best news – there is optimism about economic recovery and spin doctors are saying that we are finally moving forward.
Bad news
– part of the unemployment rate drop has to do with people who have dropped out
of the labor market. They can’t
afford to look for work anymore, so they are just looking for light. If those who dropped out stayed in,
we’d be looking at much higher unemployment rates. Worst news – several states are trying to cut public sector
employees using the fiction that these folks are too well paid and have too
many benefits for the states to afford them. We have runaway legislatures in
Wisconsin and Indiana, where Democrats refuse to be badgered by those
Republicans who have sent reason running and are determined to pulverize
unions. Even worst news, is
the intransigence of Washington Tea Party Republicans that want to cut budgets
so drastically that they will minimize the future possibilities of our nation.
The
unspoken news is the ways that foreclosures have completely eviscerated the
economic underpinnings of middle income communities, and the African American
middle class in particular. I
participated in a Washington Post panel on race and the recession recently, and
when moderator Michelle Singletary asked who knew someone who had experienced
foreclosure, almost the entire audience stood. People don’t want to talk about what they perceive as their
personal economic failures, but when a personal problem is magnified 1000
times, according to Gloria Steinem, it becomes a political or structural
problem. These foreclosures are
about wealth transfer, not about personal failure. It erodes middle-class confidence, makes it difficult for
people to spend. And, if we don’t
spend, the economy doesn’t recover.
The Obama
Administration cannot afford to take scantly positive economic numbers and rest
their hat on them. Targeted job
creation programs are in order right now. These programs may be politically unpalatable, what with the Tea Party
folks trying to cut programs that are economically restoring to those who were
losers in the Great Recession. The African American community has been hard hit, but hardly heard,
perhaps with respect to our first African American president. Still, you won’t get fed in your mama’s
house if you don’t bring your plate to the table. Who is bringing our plate? Where is the pointed and real request for relief to the
African American community? Every
other community with needs has asked that their needs be addressed. What about the African American
community?
I am
weary and wary of numbers that say that there is economic recovery when I live
in a world where recovery has not yet happened. Indeed, the 192,000 jobs generated in this last month are
good, but not great results. We need to generate at least 400,000 jobs a month, according to the
Economic Policy Institute, to catch up and repair the damage of the Great
Recession. We should do better
than 192,000 in coming months, and President Obama’s policies may even be able
to get us to an 8.5 percent unemployment rate by September 2011, or even
sooner. Still, we have to address
the long-term unemployed, the labor market dropouts, and those African
Americans who are still at the periphery of the economy. Macroeconomic policy won’t trickle down
to these groups unless there is a targeted effort to include them, and Obama’s
Tea Party defensive, racial stance, isn’t going to drill deep into the places
where economic pain has hit hardest.
Are we
banking on this economic recovery, then? I am cautiously optimistic that there is recovery in the air. And, I am absolutely horrified that
there has been no targeting to the least and the left out. Two years after our nation’s
economic meltdown, Wall Street is recovering, even thriving. Those who were at the periphery in 2008
find themselves even further distanced in recovery. Who is banking on recovery? Who is making money? Dare I say that banks are doing better than the rest of us?
Julianne
Malveaux, economist and author, is
President of Bennett College for Women. Her most recent book, Suriving and Thriving: 365 Facts in Balck Economic
History, is available from www.lastwordprod.com.
