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Tuesday, January 31, 2012

THIS IS WHY REVOLUTIONS START

Zero Hedge posted the chart below to show the potentially explosive situation in Europe with so many youths unemployed. Aren’t you glad the explosive situation is in Europe? But wait. Let’s look at the BLS data for youths in America. Here is the link:

ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/lf/aat3.txt

Here are the facts:

There are 37.9 million people in the U.S. between the ages of 16 and 24 and only 17.1 million of them are employed. That means that 55% are not employed.
The BLS uses their magic 8 ball to conclude that 17 million of these yuuts aren’t really in the labor force. How convenient. I know I worked from the age of 16 onwards even when I was in school.
The BLS manipulated numbers show a 25.9% unemployment rate for 16 to 19 year olds and 15.1% for 20 to 24 year olds.
The rates for men are even higher at 28.8% and 17.8%.
The rates for black men are off the charts at 45.4% and 29.8%
No matter how you spin the numbers, 55% of the yuuts in this country are not working. As unbelievable as it sounds, 84% of the black men in this country between the ages of 16 and 24 do not work. You can verify my calculations by clicking the BLS link above.

The youths around the world are losing hope. It is even worse than Europe and the U.S. in the Middle East. Revolution is brewing. I can feel it in my bones.

Zero Hedge captures the explosive nature of these facts regarding Europe:

Surging Greek and Portuguese bond yields? Plunging Italian bank stocks? The projected GDP of the Eurozone? In the grand scheme of things, while certainly disturbing, none of these data points actually tell us much about the secular shift within European society, and certainly are nothing that couldn’t be fixed if the ECB were to gamble with hyperinflation and print an inordinate amount of fiat units diluting the capital base even further. No: the one chart that truly captures the latent fear behind the scenes in Europe is that showing youth unemployment in the continent’s troubled countries (and frankly everywhere else). Because the last thing Europe needs is a discontented, disenfranchised, and devoid of hope youth roving the streets with nothing to do, easily susceptible to extremist and xenophobic tendencies: after all, it must be “someone’s” fault that there are no job opportunities for anyone. Below we present the youth (16-24) unemployment in three select European countries (and the general Eurozone as a reference point). Some may be surprised to learn that while Greece, and Portugal, are quite bad, at 30.7% and 46.6% respectively, it is Spain where the youth unemployment pain is most acute: at 51.4%, more than half of the youth eligible for work does not have a job! Because the real question is if there is no hope for tomorrow, what is the opportunity cost of doing something stupid and quite irrational today?

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sounds like it's time to leave the Democrat plantation.