The Department of Labor has released a report on black unemployment, and the news is grim. Walter Mead has a good discussion of the findings in the report, but does not say much about the differences between the states.
Those differences are worth discussing because the variation among states is so high.
The five worst states for black unemployment are Wisconsin (25.0 percent), Michigan (23.9 percent), Minnesota (22.0 percent), Maine (21.4 percent), and Washington (21.1 percent). All five are significantly above the national rate for blacks, 16.2 percent. (In May, the comparable rates for whites and Hispanics were 8.0 and 11.9, respectively.)
The five best states for black unemployment are New Hampshire (10.3 percent), Hawaii (9.6 percent), Idaho (8.0 percent), Wyoming (6.2 percent) and Alaska (5.4 percent). (The map at the end of the report has Arizona at 10.2 percent, which contradicts the text. I am fairly sure that's a mistake in the map.)
(There are no estimates for four states with very small black populations, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Vermont.)
I am not going to draw any grand conclusions from these differences, since I don't know enough about the policies of those ten states. But I will observe that most leftists would consider the five worst states "progressive" (I would say reactionary), and that most leftists would have other adjectives for the five best states, except, of course, for Hawaii.
And I will add one small point about Washington state: My home state has the highest minimum wage in the United States, thanks to a labor-union-backed initiative. That may be one of the reasons that black unemployment is higher here than in most other states.
Cross posted at Jim Miller on Politics.
Posted by Jim Miller at July 13, 2011 09:59 AM | Email ThisConversely, conservatives prefer education vouchers, which were a huge success among black families in Washington DC...that is, until the Obama administration killed the program to placate their teacher's union pals.
My hope is that one day soon blacks will revolt against the twin Dimocrat plantations of ignorance and bondage.
Posted by: Saltherring on July 13, 2011 05:12 PMEducation is the big one of course. Black parents often support school choice, while the left will give up the gov't education monopoly only from cold, dead hands.
Another not often mentioned is that blacks are more likeley to be crime victims. That means gun control is a disaster for blacks. I work in a blue collar union job, and quite a few of my co-workers are black. Many if not most are gun owners, sensibly wishing to protect what they work hard for.
And last but not least, it seems to me that we're skating dangerously close to a return to open & overt racism. Eventually Dems habit of playing the race card will take a toll. Check the comments threads in the Seattle Times whenever there is a high-profile crime involving a black perp, like the bus-tunnel beating. You'll see what I'm talking about. We've had decades of progress, but it can easily go backwards if we take it for granted.
Posted by: travis t on July 13, 2011 05:54 PM