Florida's Unemployment Numbers

Not to rain on the parade, BUT, the results headlined claiming a economic miracle are at best disingenuous.  No political leader wants to face high unemployment numbers.  Towards that end there are tactics that can be developed and put in place that mask the impacts of various policies.  

What I believe what we should do is look towards numbers that are outside the realm of political manipulation.  One hard number is the seasonally adjusted non agricultural employment figure which for November was 7,281,700.

The U.S. Census has just reported that Florida’s population is now 19.1 million. This yields a ratio of employed to total population of 38.12%.  Where you to look at the published numbers for April, 2010 you will find non agricultural employment at 7,196,600.  

The Census shows a population of 18,301,310 The resulting ratio is 38.27%.  This is a slight decline in the total percentage of people working. The BLS uses a population figure that looks at individuals who potentially could be employed to the number of people working.  That figure over the past four months has shown an increase of 0.4% nationally.  

Taking a longer view, since Jan, 2001, shows a decease of 5.9%.  That is the real story, there are increasing fewer and fewer people working. 

Shouldn’t there be a on going serious conversation regarding the high rate of unemployment of returning military veterans?  There are figures suggesting this group has a unemployment rate of thirty percent. Something we need to look at the level of underemployment as well as the number of people working part time. These are factors that indicate the over health of the working population.

Another factor that speaks to health of the state’s economy is the mean hourly wage that is paid in Florida.  I randomly selected five states to compare to us, they are - Texas, Mississippi, Washington, Michigan and Arizona.  Out of this random group only Mississippi had a lower mean hourly wage, what does that say about our state?