Unemployment rate for Americans aged 16-24 is now 52.2 percent

Is this really a realistic age group to be questioning for employment rates? Wouldn't most 16-18 year olds have been employed part-time or summers. The article says it excludes students, but what about students who work? Have more of this age group remained students due to the lack of available work, resulting in the total number of people counted in this age group to shrink?

This article reeks of fuzzy numbers to me. I can't find the exact data set needed to determine this rate, but the BLS unemployment tables are here: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.toc.htm

How can you write an article about this and not mention rising minimum wage laws? For most companies, it's just not worth it to buy an hour of employment from a 17 year old for $7.25.

This would be a good time for this age group to learn a trade or do a start-up.

I learned (web design, development, marketing, seo) doing my start-up then I ever did in college.

A start-up that needs to be created is a site that mixes Craiglist job section with Facebook; site lists jobs of X company, lists all employees who denote they work (Facebook connect) there and then the job seeker sees which friend in their network is connected to an employee at the company for a referral. Web 1.0 job sites is where everyone currently goes and the employers are inundated with resumes. Getting introduce to hiring manager, HR person or an employee would get you pushed to the head of the stack; get you an interview over all the others just blindly sending resumes! If you know someone directly then you don't have to use Facebook, but Facebook opens the doors to degrees of separations you never knew about.

Great, another site that redirects iphone traffic to their fancy iphone home page, disregarding the original link.

The people unemployed should be their web development team.

Note how the EPI shill is only allowed to make factual or neutral statements, while the Republican shill gets to discuss the only policy options in the piece.

The article also notes that the unemployment rate hasn't been above 50% in any of the last 4 or so major recessions. It also doesn't say what the baseline is. Is 48% unemployment in this bracket the norm? If so this is just economic sensationalism.

United States Department of Labour: "The youth (16-24) unemployment rate was 18.5 percent in July 2009.". It was 14.0 in July 2008.

From the same source: "The employment-population ratio for young men was 52.2 percent in July 2009."

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/youth.nr0.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/youth.t02.htm

Seems like that NY Post messed up. Employment-population ratio is not the same as unemployment rate. It includes people who are in school, jail etc. - in other words, outside of work force. Those reach 13,9 million vs. 19,3 million, who are employed.

I don't know what the situation is in general, but when I was a teenager (not that long ago, though longer than I'd like), in the town where I lived most places wouldn't even consider hiring anyone under 18 because of legal issues.

If you assume that everyone aged 16 or 17 is unemployed, that the number of people of each age is equal, and that I can do arithmetic just before bed, the unemployment rate for the 18-24 year olds would be only 36% or so.

Sensationalism. Yet another journalistic fail attempting to brainwash the masses with political bias and facts skewed to a one-sided persuasion.

How does this stuff make it to the front page of YC News?