Black Unemployment

The National Review, apparently still upset at Kanye West for bad talking president Bush has posted an article meant to show that Bush does love black people:

Since Bush’s tax cuts arrived in May 2003, the economy has created 4.7 million payroll jobs and the unemployment rate has dropped from 6.1 percent to 4.7 percent. Even more striking than the booming job market, however, is the rapid improvement in black employment. Last August, BuzzCharts pointed out that black unemployment was historically low. Since then, it has fallen even further. In fact, it has dropped from 10.6 percent in November to 9.3 percent in December to 8.9 percent in January. You have to go all the way back to July 2001 to find lower levels of black unemployment.

I will not get into the 4.7 million payroll jobs since that is a whole other post but I want to point out that black unemployment rate for blacks has generally been twice that of whites. So the only way this article could be true or relevant is if the unemployment data shows that the decline in black unemployment is statistically greater than the decline in white unemployment. So since the article trotted out a chart from the Bureau of Labour I decided to check the numbers.

for 2005 the unemployment rate for white men 16 and over is 4.4%
the 2005 unemployment rate for black men 16 and over is 10.5%

This data can be found here:
ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/lf/aat24.txt

Even black women get the short end of the employment stick with near double digit unemployment rates compared to to white women.
It should also be noted that the data shows that the same disproportionate rates of unemployment also stands when restricting the lowest age to 25.

Therefore, as usual, the black unemployment rate is still greater than 2X that of whites. But the National Review would like for us to believe that somehow the so called "Bush plan" is a boon to blacks. Of course, we should expect the usual so called "black conservatives" to tout the same misleading numbers as proof that the Republican Party is for all us cullud folk. Ahhhh..no.

Technorati Tags: Black Employment, politics