The Black Unemployment Rate

Josh Marshall listens to Donald Trump so we do not have to:

President Trump has been out bragging that “because of my policies” the African-American unemployment rate has dropped to its lowest level ever. This appears to be technically true. But I thought it made sense to give some context for the nonsensical nature of this claim. As you can see, the idea that this is “because of my policies” is a bit hard to square with the actual data.

Josh provides the data on the black unemployment rate from January 1972 to December 2017. This rate spiked during the Great Recession but fell dramatically during the Obama term and continued its decline. Far enough but this is a very misleading metric. While the black unemployment rate is lower than it was even in 2000, let’s note why. The black labor force participation rate was only 62.1% as of December 2017 as opposed to 66.0 percent in April 2000. A better metric would be to compare the black employment to population rate which reached 61.4% but was only 57.9% as of December 2017. One has to wonder if Trump just thinks we are stupid or if he has just incredibly low expectations.