Fri Feb 12, 2010 at 12:36:03 PM EST
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( - promoted by Sheila Webb-Halpern)
On Thursday, Senators Charles Grassley and Max Baucus unveiled their new jobs bill, the HIRE (Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment) Act. This is a welcome measure for a country that is still deep in a recession. Jobs, along with credit, are at the center of this economic downturn. (For a visual, this time-lapse map of county-by-county unemployment shows just how stark the rise has been.) Now that the credit markets have been at least partially freed up, the argument goes, jobs are what this country needs most.
But unemployment isn’t just as simple as a single figure. Aside from the problematic ways in which that one number is tabulated (for example, it doesn’t take into account people no longer looking for work), there are geographic and racial discrepancies in unemployment numbers that cannot be ignored. While the overall unemployment rate dropped in January to 9.7 percent, the figures were less promising for African-Americans. Overall unemployment in the African-American community rose to 16.5 percent, and unemployment among black men rose a full percentage point to 17.6 percent – a high for this current recession.
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