Tom Barrett: African American Unemployment

This report from Media Trackers should get national attention.

Liberal Democrats, via their policies and their action or inaction, don't help the impoverished. They don't help minorities. They don't better economic conditions.

What the report reveals is beyond troubling. It's frightening that under Mayor Tom Barrett, liberal Democrat, the city of Milwaukee would fall so far so fast.

After ninety-six months as mayor of Milwaukee, Tom Barrett has presided over an astonishing collapse of African American jobs. Barrett, who became mayor in 2004 after demolishing the campaign of Milwaukee’s first and only African American mayor, Marvin Pratt, has repeatedly frustrated minority community leaders who believe he has done too little to solve the ongoing crisis.

Milwaukee accounts for a significant majority of Wisconsin’s African American population. By two different measurements, the unemployment rate and the jobless rate, African Americans have suffered devastating job losses in recent years.

According to the Center On Wisconsin Strategy, (COWS) a progressive leaning think tank funded in part by Wisconsin taxpayers, the statewide African American unemployment rate in 2005 stood at 10.9%. That was just 1.1 percentage points higher than the jobless rate among African Americans in 2000. But in 2010, the latest year for which COWS data appears to be available, Wisconsin’s African Americans suffered from a 25% unemployment rate.

In just five years, Wisconsin’s African American unemployment rate jumped 150%, with most of those suffering from the crisis living in Mayor Barrett’s Milwaukee.

At the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee (UWM), one regularly measured statistic is the jobless rate, which differs from the unemployment rate in that it counts workers who have stopped looking for work and have thus “exited” the labor force. The number of people who have stopped looking for a job or cannot hold some jobs (such as felons) is important because it measures the cumulative impact of joblessness and presents a bigger picture of the economy as it is experienced by a particular demographic.

UWM professor Marc Levine has kept regular track of African American joblessness in the metro Milwaukee area. In 2007, 51.1% of African American males in the Milwaukee region were without a job. By 2010, the last year for which numbers are available, the figure had crept up to 55.3%.

Tom Barrett's record as mayor of Milwaukee is horrible. IT'S HORRIBLE.

I sincerely do not get why Milwaukeeans reelected Barrett as mayor.

What a mistake!

My fellow Wisconsinites, why would you vote for Tom Barrett to be governor?

THINK!