Thursday, October 20, 2016

UNEMPLOYMENT AND POVERTY IN CITIES

WSJ has published an interesting article refuting Donald Trump's claim of  45% poverty with jobs essentially nonexistent (I urge you to read the full article),  Following are quotes from the article in italics:*

“You go into the inner cities and you see it’s 45% poverty,” [Mr. Trump] said during the second presidential debate. “African-Americans now—45% poverty in the inner cities. The education is a disaster. Jobs are essentially nonexistent.”
...........................................................
UNEMPLOYMENT
Here’s one way to look at it: The Brookings Institution provided economic data for the largest city within each of the 15 largest metro areas. The data is derived from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
.........................................................................
Just two of those  [15] cities—Atlanta and Detroit—lost jobs since 2009, the year PresidentBarack Obama took office. Washington, with a 22.9% increase, led the nation in in job creation, followed by Seattle, Riverside, Calif., and San Francisco.
........................................................................
Employment of black and Hispanic workers rose in nearly all the cities from 2009 to 2015, while white employment declined in half of the cities. 
Black employment increased 44.5% in Phoenix, the nation’s largest increase. It fell 12.5% in Detroit from 2009 to 2015. Latino employment rose 36.8% in Philadelphia, but fell in Detroit and was flat in Dallas. Racial data wasn’t available for all 15 cities due to small sample sizes.
(Click on figure to enlarge)
.........................................................................
POVERTY
None of the 15 cities had a black poverty rate as high as 45% [as Mr. Trump suggests]But the rate for black residents last year was 39.4% in Detroit, 35.8% in Miami and 31.5% in Chicago. The overall poverty rate last year was 13.5%. The rate for blacks nationwide was 24.1%.
The disparity between whites, blacks and Latinos was quite large in some cities. In San Francisco, 8.9% of whites lived in poverty last year. The rate for blacks was 33.1%, and for Latinos 14.4%. In Houston, where the white rate was 8.4% last year, the black rate was 25.8%, and the Latino rate 27%.
It’s not the dismal jobless landscape Mr. Trump suggests. But in some of America’s cities, there are glaring inequalities.

* http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/10/19/what-donald-trump-gets-right-and-wrong-about-americas-inner-cities/?mod=djemRTE_h

No comments:

Post a Comment