Will Perry Win With 16% Unemployment?
Into the presidential race rides another man from Texas, Governor Rick Perry. If this election is about jobs, the Republicans would have to be crazy to nominate anyone else. While the Democrats will try to parse and spin the numbers, Texas has done better than the rest of the nation in creating jobs, perhaps the end of the discussion for most of the electorate.
In describing and selling the Texas story, the Governor needs to move away from the unemployment rate and talk about the raw numbers. In January of 2009, there were approximately 153,445,000 individuals in the American work force according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). By August of 2011, the American work force had only increased by 900,000. This, in a nation where millions were graduating high school and college, millions were entering the country legally and illegally and while millions were delaying retirement because of the economic climate. The work force should have expanded to 158,000,000 or 160,000,000 by August of 2012.
What happened? Between January of 2009 and August of 2011, there was an increase of more than 4,000,000 in the BLS category of people who are over 16 years old and are not in the work force. This is where the long-term unemployment nightmare is buried in the statistics. Individuals, by the millions, have left the work force because there are no jobs available for which either they are willing to apply or educationally qualified to be hired.
Last summer when I was beginning to write From Three to Five, a novel about the 2012 election that was released in June, my original preface talked about a real unemployment rate of 16% by the summer of 2012. As I got closer to publication, I reduced that fictional 2012 real unemployment rate to 11% because I did not think anyone would find 16% remotely believable. Yet, here we are in September of 2011 and the real unemployment rate may be approaching 16%. It is already there and worse in some minority communities.
If Governor Perry wants to be the President, he needs to convince the American public not only that he can help the economy create jobs, but that he can also convince the millions of Americans not seeking work to seek jobs, to seek education and to try to achieve the American dream of individual economic independence. We will see if Governor Perry is the Texas governor who can accomplish the task.
