Unemployment

Only one thing was lacking from your otherwise excellent recent coverage of California's high unemployment rate: discussion of a primary cause. For the past 25 years or so, but especially in the 1980s, California has been a destination country for hundreds of thousands of immigrants each year. In the '80s alone, California became home to more than 2.5 million immigrants and, if present trends continue, under current law somewhere between 3.1 to 4.2 million immigrants will settle here in the 1990s.

Washington is poised to stop providing extended unemployment benefits despite the huge number of laid-off workers, the paucity of job openings, the high rate of underemployment in every sector of the economy and stubbornly slow economic growth. That's because Republicans in the Senate insist that, unlike the hefty tax cuts they covet for the wealthy, the comparatively slender subsidies for the unemployed must not be financed with borrowed money. This penuriousness is not just hypocritical, it's bad economics.

The thousands of temporary workers who lost their jobs after the holidays dampened the weekly unemployment report. New jobless claims climbed to 399,000 in the week ending Jan. 7. That was 24,000 more than the previous week and the highest number in six weeks, the Labor Department said Thursday . Economists say claims need to drop to no more than 375,000 for a sustained period to make a dent in the unemployment rate, which fell to...

In my Sunday column , I briefly mentioned a counterintuitive idea: When unemployment is high, Democratic candidates may benefit, even when the Democrat is an incumbent. How can that be? Don't voters punish the party in power when unemployment goes up? Won't voters desert President Obama because unemployment appears stuck at 8.1%? After all, since 1936, no president has been reelected when unemployment exceeded 7.2%. Evidence suggests that it's not so simple; unemployment affects voters in a more complicated way than a simple reward-and-punishment model.

Taking his campaign to a state that spurned him four years ago that will serve as a crucial test of his appeal to the conservative voters in his party, Mitt Romney kept his focus trained on the economy and unemployment Wednesday - arguing that his private-sector credentials made him the best suited Republican candidate to defeat President Obama. Romney's top surrogate in South Carolina, Gov. Nikki Haley, echoed that message as she made her pitch for Romney and chided the Republican contenders who have been criticizing Romney's work at Bain Capital, a private equity firm that he co-founded.  “We have a real problem when we have Republicans talking like Democrats against the free market,” Haley said.

Young combat veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan have another challenge waiting for them when they return home: steep unemployment. More than 1 in 5 can't find work, according to data released Friday by the Labor Department. The unemployment rate last year for veterans ages 18 to 24 reached 21.1%, compared to 16.6% for that age group as a whole. In addition to the recession, veterans groups attribute the high jobless rate to a lack of education, job experience and job training in the years before entering the service.

Though American employers advertised slightly more job openings in May, economists continued to predict high unemployment in advanced economies through 2013. A total of 3.6 million available positions were posted last month - up about 200,000 from April and the second-highest level in nearly four years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. With 12.7 million people unemployed in May, that's about 3.5 job-seekers for each open spot. The government report, known as JOLTS , showed more open jobs in the manufacturing and government sectors.

The argument of the Feldsteins has me wondering at the expertise of some economists. They say that reducing the 6.2% unemployment rate will increase inflation and they advocate not taking any steps to reduce it. Nonsense! First, this rate does not include those who have dropped out of the job market; second, those who are under-employed; third, those whose wages are substantially less than in previous jobs. Our factory capacity remains at about 80%, and the Feldsteins are worried.