Seven months into the Pandemic Recession, the damage is deepening. Although the majority of Americans have been negatively affected to some degree by the partially shuttered economy, every day a second stimulus package isn’t passed means additional pain for some of America’s most vulnerable people. While plenty of the affluent have had their lives upended, many of the not-so-well-off were struggling even with pre-pandemic unemployment at historically low levels. Some had never recovered from the Great Recession. Their struggle has been ratcheted up several notches since March. The relief provided by the stimulus CARES Act is now mostly expended.
Most Republican politicians clearly have no clue about how tough things have become, and not a few are downright cruel in their disdain for providing any further relief. As with the Hooverites during the Great Depression and the vast majority of Republicans in Congress during the Great Recession, the prevailing attitude is that the economy will improve if we just leave it alone. Except, of course, when it comes to cutting more taxes on the wealthy. Devil take the hindmost is the underlying philosophy.
The liberal Center for Budget Policies and Priorities (CBPP) is tracking the Pandemic Recession’s impacts, which have struck Black, Latino, Indigenous, and immigrant households hard, with an even more disproportionate effect on women in those groups. Structural racism in education, employment, housing, and health care is exacerbating those impacts. To measure them, CBPP is using weekly data from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, the census’ monthly Current Population Survey, and various reports from the Department of Labor. The short version: The hits are harsh and large. Here are some details of CBPP’s ongoing findings.
Not Enough to Eat
Some 23 million adults—10.5% of the population—is going hungry part of the time, 80% of those having reported they sometimes could not afford more food. The rest cited pandemic safety concerns or lack of transportation, according to the Household Pulse Survey for the week ending Sept. 14. Households with children were more likely than those without to report they didn’t get enough to eat: 14% compared to 8% for households without children. By contrast, 3.7% of the overall population reported they sometimes didn’t get enough to eat in 2019. According to the Pulse survey for the last two weeks of August, seven to 11 million children didn’t get enough to eat, that range being so wide because the survey is designed to measure adults, not give precise numbers on children.
Behind on the rent or mortgage
Statistics in this matter are complicated by the Census Bureau’s rewording of the question on ability to cover rent or house payments and because of a low response rate by youth, Black people, and Latinos. But the available data show an estimated 13 million adults—16% of renters—were behind on paying rent. The racially disproportionate impact was clear here, too: 25% of African American renters, 24% of Asian American renters, and 22% Latino renters said they owed rent compared to just 12% of white renters. Of renters who live with children, 25% reported being behind on rent, twice the 12% among adults not living with anyone under age 18. An estimated 10 million adults live in a household behind on its mortgage payments.
Unemployment is concentrated in low-wage jobs
Early on in the pandemic, the unemployment rate soared into territory not seen since the 1930s. It had retreated to 7.9% when the two surveys the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) uses to measure who is at work and who isn’t were undertaken in the middle of September. Because of the fluidity of an economy in crisis as well as the Department of Labor’s problematic definitions of what constitutes being unemployed and being out of the workforce, many critics view that statistic as an undercount.
This is no doubt true for the statistical subsets as well, although the trend is obvious: 12.1% of Black workers, 10.3% Latino workers, and 8.9% of Asian workers were officially unemployed in September. That compares with 7% of white workers.
As The Post reported last week, the Pandemic Recession “is the most unequal in modern U.S. history.” Latinos saw the worst initial employment losses, and they are still farthest behind in getting back to where they were in February. And while white Americans have recovered well over half the jobs they lost in the pandemic, African Americans have only recovered about a third of the jobs they have lost.
Most layoffs have come in industries paying low average wages. The lowest-paying jobs make up 30% of all U.S. jobs, but 50% of the jobs lost from February to September. In that period, jobs in low-paying industries were down 11.5%, while jobs in medium-wage industries were down 6.9% and in high-wage industries down 4.1%.
Without additional stimulus, the situation will worsen. By mid-September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday, 10.7 million fewer people were on the job than was the case in February. After the surge in millions of layoffs in March and April, job growth put about half of the unemployed back to work in May and June. But that recovery has slowed since then, leaving us with at least 13 million unemployed who wouldn’t have been unemployed had the economy kept going at the pace it was at the beginning of the year. Again, an undercount, as the Economic Policy Institute has frequently pointed out.
On Wednesday, the BLS released its latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) report. Job openings fell from 6.7 million in July to 6.5 million in August. Ignoring the undercount, as Elise Gould notes, that means 10 jobs for every 20 people out of work. And while layoffs had tapered off, they are now on the rise again.
In a speech delivered online to the National Association for Business Economics Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell noted: “The expansion is still far from complete” adding that “many will undergo extended periods of unemployment.” Fears about Congress putting too much money into stimulus should be weighed against the risks of not doing enough, he said. Although the federal budget is on an “unsustainable path and has been for some time … this is not the time to give priority to those concerns. [...] The risks of overdoing it seem, for now, to be smaller. Even if policy actions ultimately prove to be greater than needed they will not go to waste. The recovery will be stronger and move faster.”
Sadly, infuriatingly, a big fraction of congressional Republicans would obviously prefer to see the economy go down in flames than take the courses of action to make recovery come stronger and quicker.
from Daily Kos https://ift.tt/2FhzOzI
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