I know I’m supposed to be shocked by the 50% to 60% youth unemployment rates in Greece and Spain, but I’m not. We have the exact same rates of youth unemployement here in the good old US of A. Greece and Spain need to outsource their data reporting to the BLS and things will get miraculously better overnight. My guess is that Greece and Spain actually calculate how many 15 to 24 year olds have a job versus the total number of 15 to 24 year olds. How antiquated and unoriginal.
Our beloved BLS reports an unemployment rate of 17.6% for all 16 to 24 year olds in America. Isn’t that precious? There happen to be 38.9 million 16 to 24 year olds in the United States of America. There happen to be 17.2 million of them employed. For the math challenged out there, this means that 56% of all 16 to 24 year olds in our country are not employed. Sure sounds like it is at Greece and Spain levels to me. So how can the BLS report a 17.6% unemployment rate with a straight face? They just ASSUME that 18 million 16 to 24 year olds are not in the labor force by their own choosing. That’s a helluva an assumption. Checkout the numbers for yourself:
http://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea13.htm
I don’t know about you, but I was in the workforce from 16 years old and on. Just because you are in high school or college doesn’t take you out of the labor force. Every 16 to 24 year old can and should at least have a part-time job. The propaganda put out by the BLS is complete and utter bullshit. Our youth unemployment is at Greece and Spain levels. The youth unemployment in black urban enclaves is greater than 80%. The fuse is lit. It’s just a matter of time before the powderkeg explodes.
Greek Youth Unemployment Tops 60%
Submitted by Tyler Durdenon 02/14/2013 11:56 -0500
Optimism it seems is all that matters (or is all that is allowed) as we are battered by dismal data left, right, and center. Of course, a reflection on the markets tells any ‘smart’ person that it all must get better – or why would stocks or sovereigns, or EURUSD be where it is? However, the 6 out of 10 15-24 year olds in Greece (61.7% to be exact) would beg to differ with that view of the world (as their economy grinds to a halt) – and with Spain reaching new highs at 55.6% (as well as the Euro-zone over 24%), all the bureaucratic lip-service in the world won’t stop the revolt that is coming we fear.
JIMSKI says:
My first job at 14 was humpin bags at Inverness Country Club as a B caddy. Made A at 16 with a 2 buck an 18 raise. Inverness was a hilly bitch of a course that took 4 hours to walk. With tip as an A that mad it about 3 bucks an hour. If I was lucky I would run a double 9 during the afternoon when the women we allowed on the course. Double meant you had 2 golfers and would run behind the cart. Carts could do a 9 in about 1.5 hours and paid about the same as women tipped better.
Like or Dislike:
4 
0
14th February 2013 at 2:15 pm
Ron says:
I worked at a car dealer washing cars for 6 bucks an hour and did burnout testing on each car i could. My boss liked doing it also.
Im torn between wanting my kids to work part time or wait to join the rat race that thinks money is God.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
5 
0
14th February 2013 at 4:16 pm
NickelthroweR says:
The children in our town, myself included, were used like Mexicans today. I cut grass, raked leaves, shoveled snow and in the fall picked apples (at .25 a bushel) at various orchards. I also had a paper route. If I had a really good week then I could make as much as $20!!!
I can still remember the back breaking labor of shoveling someone’s sidewalk and driveway for .50!
Finally, I’m only 46 so it isn’t like I’m talking about the Great Depression or something.
Fun times.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
9 
1
14th February 2013 at 4:21 pm
printmemoney says:
They are waiting us out. Right now, we can continue to print dollars, lie about our economic numbers, and act confused about the jobless recovery. We never left recession. The only reason the barbarians at the gate haven’t sold the dollar and treasuries with strength is because of our military. But we are being waited out, and our military is dying from within after 12 years of war.
I know there has been discussion about the slide, crumble, or collapse. Who knows? I didn’t know the Berlin wall was coming down the day before, so we can call that a collapse….the Soviet Union slide from the 80s to the millenium, lets call that a crumble.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
5 
0
14th February 2013 at 7:43 pm
Pirate Jo says:
My dad wanted the purple clover growing on the southeast hill, because he liked the looks of it better and thought it provided better soil erosion control. (This hill was right above our driveway.)
Therefore, he wanted to eradicate all the tall, stalky yellow clover, and told my my brother and me that he’d pay us a penny apiece for every yellow-clover stalk we cut down.
It was genocide on that hill.
My brother and I were out in 90+ degree heat all day long, cutting down every last one of those little bastards we could find, for two days. We brought back bundles. I had twelve dollars’ worth. Jeffy had eight.
When my dad got home and saw that his landscaping was going to cost twenty bucks, he pretended to balk at the payment. My mother, who had been wielding lemonade all day, pretended to argue on our behalf.
We got paid, and I took the money to Waldenbooks, which was the only bookstore around back then, which was at a mall 40 miles away, and spent it on Walter Farley books.
This would have been around 1980.
Later jobs involved detasseling corn, working at McDonald’s, and then doing data entry during the summers and washing dishes in the commons during college.
I liked work better back then.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
11 
0
14th February 2013 at 8:22 pm
printmemoney says:
Pirate Jo -
Your post struck a cord. I remember when I was young and working. Back then, it was based on simple things like showing up on time, working hard, following orders, and making the ship run better.
Ha – everything in life is politics….especially when you get older
Like or Dislike:
3 
0
14th February 2013 at 8:38 pm
Makati1 says:
What age group is most unemployed in the US?
Answer: 16-36
Number of people in this age group?
Answer: ~ 120,000,000
What age group most often participates in riots?
Answer: 16 to 36 year olds.
What will trigger the revolt?
Answer: Frustration…
When will it happen?
Answer: Anytime now.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
6 
0
14th February 2013 at 9:43 pm
Anonymous says:
While the Euro’s are scarfing down their daily dose of horse meat. They are also paying a whopping $9-10 a gallon for gas. The very life blood of the economy. Along with a massive desperate class of unemployed youths. Not good, what a recipe for disaster.
http://blog.caranddriver.com/global-gouging-a-survey-of-fuel-prices-around-the-world/
Like or Dislike:
2 
0
14th February 2013 at 11:58 pm
penny says:
I didn’t have a Job till I was 24, and I’m all the better for it.
Like or Dislike:
0 
3
14th February 2013 at 3:02 am
Reverse Engineer says:
My first “official” job was in the summer after my Sophomore year in HS. I was an Illegal Child Laborer because I was not old enough for Working Papers at the time. I was 14 then.
I worked in a Shower Curtain Factory in the NY Shity Garment district, before all those jobs were shipped off to China. My initial job was putting the holes and grommets into the top of the Shower Curtain. The tiny “factory” was a Mom & Pop operation on 1 floor of an old warehouse building. The owners were an ex-CBS News Anchor from the early days of TV Newz and his wife. He had a Stroke which caused him to lose the job and not end up as Walter Cronkite. The shower curtain Biz was something his wife started at home to keep bizzy.
The factory employed 4 women on sewing machines, all hispanic or chinese as I recall. They passed the finished curtain to me, I put the holes in the top using a foot pedal operated machine, then used a hand lever operated machine to stamp the grommets into place. It was the most god awful boring work you could ever imagine, and an 8 hour day seemed to take 8 years. Nowadays of course, no Human Being does this work even in China, robots do it. It paid as I recall around $2/hr, Min Wage at the time.
I passed the complete curtain to a Black guy who packed it for shipment. They went to Individual Customers via Mail Order. He quit the job after finally getting hired by the Post Office. I got moved to his job, which was WAY more interesting, and a friend of mine took my spot at the Grommets for that summer.
The next summer I got my first job on Wall Street, courtesy of a friend of Dad the Pigman. I worked in Accts Receivable on a 10-key Adding Machine running tapes on bundles of checks at Merrill Lynch. It was MORE boring than the Grommet work. I also sucked at it, I was slow on the 10-key compared to the pros, but they tolerated me for the summer because the CEO got me the job. LOL. Said clerical work ALSO no longer exists, because all the checks are read electronically now, if anybody actually uses them to pay a bill anymore and doesn’t use digibits on the web.
Just about ALL grunt work that low paid students would do for MinWage has been automated out of existence. The only stuff left is Service Sector, flipping Burgers at Mickey Ds, and those jobs are filled by College Graduates who can’t find IT jobs.
Bottom Line here, you have a failing model of economic distribution that stems from the debt subsidy given to Industrial Capitalism. It has never been a sustainable model from the get-go. Now that the energy is not cheap, the credit is drying up to run the model. The ever increasing UE is the outcome of that.
RE
http://doomsteaddiner.org
Like or Dislike:
3 
0
14th February 2013 at 4:39 am
TeresaE says:
If not for free food, healthcare, and roofs, along side disability for the “sad” and the student loan debacle, we would already have our riots.
The band plays on.
The funniest thing is that there ARE jobs out there for some of these unskilled kids. And as pointed out in the remembrances of a different era from above, the jobs aren’t glamorous, but they were the first steps in the path of supporting your own life.
But, most kids nowadays are “too good” for these jobs. In the word’s of one of my nephews, “I just CAN’T do it,” so he lives with dad and dad supports him. Or they are college students and they scam the system and end up spending large amounts of their student loans on pizza and beer and iPads. These kids (and many will continue this throughout their lives) do not understand the sheer beauty of compound interest and what it means to their future jobs as debt slaves.
The “What me worry?” world is now so engrained, that other than death, I’m not seeing how we fix it.
I started work younger than most. My dad was raised by depression & war weary parents and if he wanted anything, he had to work for it. He raised me the same way (not so much the younger ones). I was babysitting (benefit of being the oldest of five kids, neighbors figured if my siblings survived it, so would their kids) by 10, selling greeting cards and homemade knickknacks at 8 and making more than my mom’s part time job by 12.
What started as fun Sundays with my dad at the lakeside hardware store (my mom’s dad owned it), turned into my being able to figure both change, and sales tax, in my head, while gaining an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of a toilet or kitchen sink. I so impressed a guy from the newspaper distributors whom had stopped in to get a bolt for something, that he put me to work selling papers at the local churches on Sunday. I was ten and also learned about the beauty of taxes.
Thanks to that, I ended up taking over a double route (two major newspapers, one from Detroit and one from Toledo) in my hometown when the former carrier went to college. I doubled the route and was the youngest female carrier the company had ever hired.
This is why the minimum wage thing pisses me off so. I NEVER worked a job where I started at minimum wage and stayed their. I busted my ass to earn my way up while increasing my skills.
Something these unemployed youth will never understand
Something the likes of Obama and company don’t get either. But they will, because when the dollar devalues to the point it takes a few hundred to buy an egg, we will not just BE Greece and Spain, we will look like it too.
Fiat on.
Like or Dislike:
4 
0
14th February 2013 at 9:23 am
Dorkus Maximus says:
JIMSKI – Did you ever caddy for the Dalai Lama?
Like or Dislike:
1 
0
14th February 2013 at 10:00 am
Administrator says:
Like or Dislike:
0 
0
14th February 2013 at 10:28 am
sangell says:
We had a 20 year old black guy found shot to death in the playground of his seedy garden apartment complex two days ago. He was found at 3:00 AM. Nothing ‘unusual’ about that. What was surprising was that this young man had a job. He was employed by the HEAD START program and he wasn’t a bus driver. He was actually employed to help ‘mentor’ the children.
We spend about $6 billion per year on HEAD START and it has failed to do anything to reduce the academic gap it was intended to for. It is clearly a jobs program for the underclass. What possible benefit to underclass children is it to hire a 20 year old member of that same dysfunctional population to break the cycle of low achievement?
Like or Dislike:
1 
0
14th February 2013 at 11:12 am
WE ARE ALREADY GREECE & SPAIN - My Note Book says:
[...] More [...]
Like or Dislike:
0 
0
14th February 2013 at 6:07 am