Rx for an Ailing Economy
With two weeks to go before the election, the nation’s financial health is top of mind for Americans. According to a recent Gallup poll, nearly nine out of 10 registered voters say the economy is the most important factor in their decision about who to vote for—ahead of response to the pandemic, crime, race relations and a dozen other key issues. Additionally, nearly half of those polled said that President Donald Trump’s recent COVID-19 diagnosis had made them even more worried about the economy than they already were.
NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS BETWEEN now and Inauguration Day, January 20—even in the unlikely event of a coronavirus vaccine or a second round of stimulus checks—the next president will be looking at an economy that is in rough shape and faces a long recovery.
The current national unemployment rate, after all, is still at a lofty 7.9 percent. While that’s well below the nightmare days of late spring when it rose as high as 14.7 percent—a level second only to the rates seen during the Great Depression—it’s still in another ballpark from last January, when it stood at 3.6 percent, near its 50-year low.
That pain is not being distributed equally. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis estimates that the unemployment rate for Black Americans is 12.1 percent and 10.3 percent for Latinos, compared to 7 percent for whites; meawhile, the unemployment rate for men topped out at 13.5 percent in April while hitting 16.2 percent for women the same month. Then too, according to the Labor Department, about five million people are about to join the ranks of the “long-term unemployed,” meaning they’ve been out of work for at least six months, a point at which they are increasingly likely to stop looking for a job altogether.
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