What was everyone else's excuse?
July 30, 2015
...A reader asked (click here) us to check whether Sanders was correct, so we took a closer look. (Sanders seems to have made this a go-to talking point in his campaign; he offered a similar claim in an interview with The Nation.)
We’ll start by noting that the most commonly used unemployment-rate statistic is not as high for each group as Sanders indicated. The most readily available data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics covers the age range from 16 to 19, which isn’t identical but gives a quick approximation.
For whites in that age range, the official unemployment rate was 15.7 percent, for Hispanics it was 20.8 percent and for African-Americans it was 31.8 percent.
In other words, the official unemployment rate shows the same general pattern -- that African-American youth unemployment is significantly higher than white youth unemployment and, to a lesser extent, higher than Hispanic youth unemployment. Still, the levels for each group are lower than what Sanders said....
