Unemployment has plummeted everywhere:
Unemployment rates were lower in July than a year earlier in 383 of the 389 metropolitan areas, higher in 5 areas, and unchanged in 1 area, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.
Well, almost everywhere. So who are the five unlucky areas that managed to beat the odds and show an increase in unemployment?
- Yuma, AZ
- Bloomington, IN
- Elkhart-Goshen, IN
- Columbus, IN
- Lafayette-West Lafayette, IN
Yuma is the true outlier here, rising 1.7 percentage points from 16.6% to 18.4%. What the hell is going on out there?
The other four cities are all in Indiana. Their joblessness increases were small, but still, aside from our friends in Arizona no other state had even one area with increased unemployment. What the hell is going on out there?¹
As for the other 48 states, good job. Unemployment is down in every single area. My own metropolitan division, Anaheim-Santa Ana-Irvine, dropped a stunning 3.6 points from 6.4% to 2.8%. Hooray for us.
¹Indiana as a whole managed to eke out a 0.2% decrease in unemployment. This was the worst performance in the nation. The best performance was turned in by California, which had a 3.9% drop in unemployment. You can check out your neck of the woods here.
Lafayette = Purdue
Bloomington = Indiana University
Columbus = Cummings Engine
Elkhart = RV capital of the United States
These are all pretty prosperous towns,.
Other than the RV business slowing down it doesn’t make any sense to me.
The two big University towns jumped out at me as well.
I'm from Bloomington, while IU is the biggest employer there's a lot of pharmaceutical/medical device production there too (legacy of Cook manufacturing catheters and other devices back in the 70s).
My grandfather worked for Eli Lilly.
Indiana has a pretty low unemployment rate, all told, so it's likely these towns are doing well. I don't have time to look up the numbers, but Kevin indicates the increases in joblessness are "small" (like, 3.4 to 3.6?), so, maybe just not a very substantive issue.
I’ve heard Elkhart is also some kind of motorboat/recreational watercraft manufacturing hub.
Campers and travel trailers.
There appear to be two Michigans and no New Hampshire
Maybe Kevin listed Upper Peninsula and Michigan proper separately?
Both the UP and 'lower' Michigan try to forget the other exists. So it makes sense to have two of them.
Yuma has several military installations and a big ag sector. I'm not sure if maybe some of the DOD footprint there has been reduced recently, but there's a lot of unemployment in CA's Imperial Valley as well -- both major ag regions connected to Colorado River water. I think a lot of growers have had to cut back substantially on their acerage due to the drought and that means fewer field hands, fewer jobs at processing/packaging plants, etc.
Lucky DC isn't a state.
I love it here in Arizona, but Yuma -- ugh.
My brother in law’s brother lives in greater Phoenix. And my brother in laws last visit they had to put big blocks of ice in the swimming pool to make it tolerable.
And it still wasn’t enough.
No thanks. I’ll take my Midwestern weekly inch of rain and winter, spring, and fall.
Phoenix is pretty much a hellhole. I lived in Arizona about twenty years ago, in Flagstaff. Flagstaff was a great place to live back then. I can't speak to it today. But I spent a few days in Phoenix last summer. It is hard to judge from a small sampling, but my sense was it was every bit as hot as I remembered, and a bit more humid. At those temperatures, even a small increase in humidity makes a big difference.
With a population under 100,000 it may not take all that much to move their needle.
Yuma that is…
So, with the exception of DC and Nevada we are basically a nation at the "old fashioned" definition of full employment (below 5%).
The paradigm is shifting - mostly caused by political crowing about how well the economy is doing when "their guy" gets in versus how poorly it's doing when the "other guy" gets in.
There will be speed bumps along the way but over the next 20 years - on the whole there will be more people leaving the work force than entering the work force. Efficiency increases will NOT be able to compensate for that, nor will technology advances.
We may NEED to do more than forgive $10K of student loans. We may need to make colleges free - along with technical schools. We will need every young person to have some skill set...........
(not to mention a fair and equitable immigration system)
Yeah, or else we’ll all have our jobs taken by robots and AI. Prediction is hard …
The Indiana employment downturn is clearly the Lord, Our God avenging the murder of the 10 year old mother's child by the devilish abortionist.
Indiana is a shithole state with higher than shithole cost of living and wages. It’s scaring away all the high paying good jobs to bluer, more decent states with better amenities, and yet it still needs to sink a bit more before it’ll attract the jobs that love employing people in shitholes.
It’s got all the negatives of the South (crappy schools, high hostility to outsiders and other cultures, etc) combined with all the negatives of the North (shitty weather, high costs of living, rotting infrastructure, etc). It’s almost custom designed to be attractive to absolutely nobody who isn’t already stuck living there.
Dayton, Ohio had unemployment tick up from 4.2% in June 2022 to 4.3% in July 2022.
This is GOOD NEWS for JOHN M--... J.D. ANTIVAXXX.
Maybe just do one big chart instead of two right next to each other with different scales on the Y axis? It's confusing.
From wikipeida on Yuma
"High unemployment remains an issue in Yuma. Citing April 2014 data, the Bureau of Labor Statistics ranked Yuma as having the highest unemployment rate in the United States at 23.8 percent ... Yuma's agricultural workforce, which adjusts to the picking season, is cited by the Arizona Department of Commerce as the reason for the apparent high unemployment.". So the numbers here are a major improvement. Some minor crop must be in season.