RSSUnemployment Rate Continues to Climb – January 2009
Washington – Bureau of Labor Statistics, February 6, 2009
Nonfarm payroll employment declined sharply in January, and the unemployment rate rose from 7.2% to 7.6% according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor. Payroll employment fell by 598,000 over the month. In January, job losses were large and widespread across most major industry sectors. The number of unemployed persons increased to 11.6 million in January. Over the past 12 months, the number of unemployed persons has grown by 4.1 million, and the unemployment rate has risen by 2.7 percentage points.
The unemployment rates for most categories continued to trend upward for the month: adult men (7.6% from 7.2%), adult women (6.2% from 5.9%), whites (6.9% from 6.6%), blacks (12.6 % from 11.9%), and Hispanics (9.7% from 9.2%). The jobless rate for teenagers was unchanged at 20.8%.
The following sectors lost jobs in January
- Manufacturing employment fell by 207,000, the largest 1-month decline since October 1982.
- Construction lost 111,000 jobs.
- The temporary help industry lost 76,000 jobs.
- Retail trade employment fell by 45,000.
- Transportation and warehousing lost 44,000 jobs.
- Employment in financial activities declined by 42,000 and by 388,000 from a peak in December 2006.
Health care continued its upward trend in January with a gain of 19,000. Employment gains in the industry averaged over 30,000 per month in 2008. Employment in private education rose by 33,000 over the month.
7 Responses to “Unemployment Rate Continues to Climb – January 2009”
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July 27th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Employment won’t increase until taxes are increased, and only after employment increases will unemployment fall.
Keep in mind that taxes were highest when unemployment was lowest, and taxes lowest when the unemployment has been higher. And the lowest tax rates are when the unemployment is the highest.
But this is old news, isn’t it. When Reagan cut taxes, the growth in employment ended and employment fell sharply, and employment didn’t increase until he finally agreed to sign the first of his eight tax hikes.
And the increase in employment during the Clinton years started when read-my-lips-Bush signed his several tax hikes and then Clinton hiked taxes even more. It was the high taxes that increased employment and increased tax revenue nearly eliminating the deficit, because government spending increased rapidly while Clinton was president. Just not quite as fast as the economy grew, but government spending increased almost as fast as it did while Reagan was president.
The Republicans lost the House and Senate and then the Whitehouse because the Bush tax cuts have just kept cutting employment so that by the time Bush left office, the number of people employed was the same as when he took office, even tho millions of people had been added to the labor force, and many older workers wanted or needed to work longer adding a few million people to the labor force.
And the Bush tax cuts more than any others produced a frenzy of ponzi scheme stock and real estate bubble creation because if you can get money for nothing – selling the same thing for a higher price without doing anything to earn it – then you get taxed at lower rates than actually working for a living. The Bush tax cuts punish working for a living and reward speculative gambling because you taxed far more if you earn money though labor.
As they say, if you want to get less of something, tax it more than things you want more of, so we have had less labor and more gambling over the past eight years. Let’s at least tax gambling, capital gains, at least as much as working for a living and actually doing something useful.
January 19th, 2010 at 1:36 am
I dont see the logic here. Maybe taxes increases will increase government employment but it wont increase employment in the private sector. In fact, it will cause employment in the private sector to shrink. So maybe you get more govt jobs at the cost of priveate sector jobs, but with a nonproductive capacity, and the economy “feels” better, but all this does is increase our trade deficit and give the illusion of recovery. What you are seeing is our country beginning to collapse under the weight of its own beurocracy