Instead of the Civilian Conservation Corps, they should have a job corps that pollutes and destroys recreational infrastructure in the parks.
Instead of paying people to teach children, when a Republican is in office, we could pay underemployed teens to roll coal in front of cyclists.
Obviously at some point they're going to try to force kids to work in the fields. It will be like Castro did, but more poorly organized.
Unemployment among 16-to-24-year-olds soared from 10 percent in March 2020 to 26 percent in April, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, with the highest rates of joblessness among Black and Latino youth.
Who goes to HHS for unemployment statistics? That's BLS's province. Also the stat was already on the way up in March so weird anchor.
January 2020 (BLS): 8.6%
2021: 11.4%
2022: 8.4%
2023: 8.1%
2024: 7.3% (but a bit of an outlier, Dec 2023 was 8.0% and Feb 2024 was 8.8%)
2025: 9.0%
So important we got inflation under control, huh?
And Jan 2025 is not an outlier: Jun 2025 10.0%.
Zooming out, 16-24 unemployment was at a 50-year low in 2019: the last time it was below 8.9% was December 1969.
1960s average: 10.4%
70s: 12.7%
80s: 13.9%
90s: 12.0%
00s: 11.9%
10s: 12.9%
20s to date: 9.9%
I rather hate people abusing the word "crisis". The situation is bad, ergo it's the worst it's ever been & worsening at a unsustainable rate! Cherry-pick numbers to suit argument.
I couldn't find 16-24 unemployment by race on St. Louis Fred, maybe that was HHS's value-add, but there is 16-19 Black unemployment, and that's also historically low since they started the series in 1972.
70s: 37.1%
80s: 39.8%
90s: 33.8%
00s: 31.0%
10s: 31.6%
20s: 18.4%
Obviously at some point they're going to try to force kids to work in the fields. It will be like Castro did, but more poorly organized.
On this, Ag Secretary Rollins just said "There will be no amnesty. The mass deportations continue but in a strategic way. And we move the workforce toward automation and 100% American participation, which with 34 million able-bodied on Medicaid we should be able to do fairly quickly."
Yeah. That's what I was reading. It's obviously not going to work like that because there are not that many people on Medicaid who are able to work and not already working.
I don't think that's how they are going to recruit farm workers.
In exchange for working the tiny screws on iPhones, you can pay for health care, as a treat for being young.
13: The first sentence of the Washington Monthly article.
Well that makes sense to respond to that, then.
To be fair to 4, the article was written in 2021.
Yeah, but all unemployment rates soared with COVID relative to pre-, and were falling fast at that point so weird to frame it as something specific to youth. Plus the April 2021 numbers just seem wrong, but I don't know how that came about.
Its stuff on Job Corps is fine & valuable. Just a tic on the part of your standard left-of-center journalist to frame with "X thing is IN CRISIS".
My nephew is more than a year into job corp in MO; it's been a good route for him. But they're all on pins and needles; rumor has it that their center will shut down at the end of the month. He's close to getting certifications, but don't know if there's a good partial credit if he doesn't complete the course before the close or consolidate. [He's been working through the building trades, and seems to be good at wood and painting so far...]
I was really hoping Nia would do Job Corps. She had been accepted when she was finishing up her residential treatment program, but decided against it because she thought she could live with her dad as an independent adult, which only lasted a few days before dramatically imploding. I tried to get her to re-enroll when she decided to leave adult foster care but she won't go anywhere or do anything that won't let her live with her boyfriend, which rules out everything useful. I'm just sad and furious about this in general, but it also hurts on the personal front.
I don't know if it was Job Corps but my niece was accepted into something like that and then had the offer revoked because DOGE. And then recently she just got an invitation to apply for it again.
Its nice how were fucking with the job stability of young people early in their career.
My son is working at a Five Guys. I don't know if that's useful.
It means we have a vivid red hat around the house and it keeps giving me a start.
I have a friend who is an elderly white guy who always wears baseball caps from local coffeeshops. Sometimes he wears a red one, and when I see him out of the corner of my eye I reflexively dislike him.
I dislike Five Guys too, but not because of the red cap thing -- I find the burger to be soggy, overly large, and too expensive, especially when compared to In n Out, where I can buy a burger with my leftover metering coins, as long as I'm willing to accept the Word of the Lord Jesus Christ on the bottom of my cup of Coke Zero.
We don't have religious fast food except for chicken sandwiches.