Bill O’Reilly = #UnGifted

Follow TGL on Twitter!

Anyway, this article about who is getting the worst out of this Recession and this article states that it is the college educated white male. What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

Via Yahoo

Are “BWMs” — Beached White Males — the real victims of our struggling economy?

Newsweek’s new cover story laments the plight of college-educated white men, a traditionally comfortable group hit hard by the Great Recession and its aftermath. “Can manhood survive the lost decade?” it asks.

No doubt, the travails of the BWMs are great. But a broader look at the story of the last few years suggests the special-case sympathies are misplaced.

Newsweek’s Rick Marin and Tony Dokoupil report:

Through the first quarter of 2011, nearly 600,000 college-educated white men ages 35 to 64 were unemployed, according to previously unpublished Labor Department stats. That’s more than 5 percent jobless—double the group’s pre-recession rate. That might not sound bad compared with the plight of younger, less-educated workers and minorities, but it’s a historic change from the last recession, when about half as many lost their oxford shirts.

That’s true. Past downturns have been far kinder to college-educated white men (fine, we’ll call them BWMs). But Newsweek seems to see a broader threat. It touts an “exclusive poll” of unemployed men, finding high levels of depression, fatigue, and even (the shame!) willingness to give one’s wife a backrub if she comes home grumpy.

Yes, BWMs have taken a real hit in the job market this time. As Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) told Newsweek: Middle-aged BWMs are “doing worse than they have at any time since the Great Depression.”

But here’s the thing: So is everyone. When we called Shierholz to drill down a bit further, she told us that BWMs are “definitely doing better than any group of racial and ethnic minorities, and groups with lower education.”

Indeed, unemployment data suggest not only that BWMs are prospering more than most other groups in absolute terms, but also that the downturn hit non-whites harder than whites and those without college degrees harder than those with. In other words, as in past recessions, the groups that were already struggling bore the brunt of the blow.

First, let’s consider the absolute terms. Per Newsweek, the jobless rate for BWMs between 35 and 64 is more than 5 percent. But the overall jobless rate is 8.9 percent, meaning unemployment for non-BWMs is likely twice what it is for BWMs. So the numbers don’t sound that bad.

But even if BWMs are advantaged over other segments of the population, they might still have taken a bigger hit during the Great Recession and its aftermath. If so, it would perhaps be worth singling them out as cause for special concern.

However, that doesn’t seem to hold true either, at least when you look at each BWM sub-group individually.

Let’s look at whites first. In the first quarter of 2007 — before the Great Recession began — 64 percent of whites were employed, according to numbers compiled by Shierholz and EPI, using Labor Department data. By the first quarter of this year, that had dropped to 59.4 percent, a decline of 4.6 percent. Sounds bad. But in the same period, the equivalent numbers for blacks went from 59 to 52 — a decline of 7 percent. And Hispanics went from 65.5 to 58.9 — a drop of 6.6 percent. So not only do blacks and Hispanics have higher current jobless rates than whites, they’ve also done worse during the downturn.

It’s a similar story when we consider education level. Looking at the same set of numbers (though these stats exclude those under 25), 77 percent of workers with college degrees were employed in early 2007. By this year, that had fallen to 73.4 percent, for a drop of 3.6 percent. Again, that’s cause for concern — but not for as much concern as the equivalent rates for those with only a high-school education. There, we went from 60.2 employment down to 54.5 — a decline of 5.7 percent. So  when the recession started, workers without degrees lagged behind workers with degrees. And today, they lag even further behind.

Alan Berube of the Brookings Institution has looked at similar numbers and come to the same conclusion. “During the Great Recession, employment dropped much less steeply among college-educated workers than other workers,” he wrote in a November 2010 study.

The only BWM sub-group that offers any support at all for the anxiety over BWMs is the M part: that is, males. Thanks to layoffs in the man-heavy financial and computer industries, employment for men has declined from 70.2 percent to 63.9 percent — a drop of 6.3 percent. Women, meanwhile, have seen a less sharp drop: from 56.9 to 53.3, or 3.6 percent. So it’s true that men have been hit harder than women by the downturn. But even so, they’re still doing a whole lot better. It’s just that the gender gap has narrowed somewhat.

To be sure, it’s newsworthy that BWMs saw significant job losses during this recession, when previous downturns had been kinder to them. That tells us something important about the Great Recession: that its effects have been felt across the board, not just among workers who traditionally are the most vulnerable.

But the magazine seems to argue that the job woes of the BWMs deserve more widespread concern than the job woes of other groups:

It might be tempting to snark at these former fat cats suffering lean times. But when Beached White Males suffer, so do their wives and children. Lives, marriages, and futures are at stake. Examining who these guys are, and what washed them up, is not an exercise in schadenfreude. It’s a cautionary tale. To quote Arthur Miller on the most famous Beached White Male, “Attention must be paid.”

This is unpersuasive, to say the least. There’s no doubt that an unemployed person’s family suffers with them, so no one’s snarking at anyone. But that’s likely just as true when the unemployed person is a woman, or is black or Hispanic, or lacks a college degree. And as the data show, those groups are actually suffering more.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the focus on the plight of the BWMs has more to do with cultural assumptions about who should be on top–or at least who always has been–than it does with any actual socioeconomic issues.

In short, if we’re going to worry about joblessness — and we’ve argued at length here that we’re not worrying about it nearly as much as we should — it would make more sense to worry about the groups that have actually been hit the hardest.

A couple of things have indeed changed for the better. Race relations on an everyday basis are definitely better, or at least more hidden to the untrained eye. The only thing is that you can’t help but think that the shooting in Arizona is getting all of this extra attention because of the atmosphere of the crime. I’m not saying that it is not a shock or a disaster that this shooting occurred, but I am saying that the all of the attention is becoming a little

Over the weekend, I was having a conversation with a good friend that lives in Maryland, not too far from DC, about the environment in the country and the shooting in Arizona and something struck me. He said, “Man, there has been a shooting everyday of this year in PG county Maryland where I grew up.”

Let’s think about that for a second. This is the second month of the New Year and there has been a murder everyday for this year to this date. Haven’t seen that on the news, but you would think that this would be something that the country would be up in arms about. Not quite. Just a 30 minute drive outside of Washington DC, there is one of the most dire situations with gun violence in the country, but you will never hear the President speak on this topic.

I’m guessing for one of two reasons. The first, it’s “really not a surprise” that this is going on. It is a black neighborhood and it has been bad for a while (and I’m being completely sarcastic). The second is a little more complicated. If you did bring national attention to the problems in PG country, you would have to look at every single city in the US that is having the same type of problem. Going out on a limb, probably wouldn’t be a good PR move. I’m just going to say that the national gun violence crisis has a lot more to do with the black people that are living in urban/inner city areas than a random kid in the suburbs.

Maybe I’m dreaming, but I would think that Obama would want to use the Arizona instance to indirectly address the situations in our cities like PG all across the country. Let’s see what happens when I wake up.

Stay Gifted.

The distinct difference between the movement in this country that we witnessed on the right and the one occurring in the Middle East right now is that the one over there was genuine. Not to say that the people at Tea Party rallies didn’t genuinely hate President Obama, but the “real reason” that they were there had no merit or integrity.

Where’s my basis for this? It’s in the people. These people aren’t booking flights and hotel rooms and making vacations out of political involvement. The people of Egypt are apart of something that will change their country forever in the spirit of the civil rights movement. While people in this country were coming together for things to stay the same way they were. It’s silly. And you wonder why people dressed up. They were trying to move the attention away from message to their outfits. That’s popular politics if I’ve ever heard it.

The Tea Party’s only problem is that while people were planning their childrens summer camp visits around when Glenn Beck was coming in town, people in other countries were taking notes on how they were organizing. Using social media outlets to organize visions and meeting locations. Showing how numbers could make even America’s government think twice even though it was an empty ask.

So to people that had a full ask of better schools, jobs and healthcare their model was probably a good as a template on Google Docs. Basically, even the worst ideas can be a teaching moment.

I just want to know what you are learning from Egypt right now. Because what I’m learning may be totally different.

Stay Gifted!

As we move on after the State of the Union where the number one focus was winning the future and restoring the country to a prosperous center of not only wealth for the fortunate but a place where the working class and poor people could find a job so that they could live comfortably. This is no little job for the President and the leadership in this country, but I just have one question. If these “new” jobs are back, will the people work?

It may sound a little harsh, but let me speak on this for a second. Because people have a feeling that jobs can be purchased at your local Wal-Mart or out of a vending machine on Capitol Hill, they are expecting jobs to come and come quickly. But these same people are not improving themselves through educational, technological and financial classes. It’s safe to say that the jobs that are coming are going to be technology based in some form or fashion so no getting ready for the next wave is going to continue the cycle of the people that don’t have.  Because the people that are saying “jobs jobs jobs!” are they same bouncing from blog to blog giving their uneducated opinion on what the country needs to do next. And I don’t see any Internet cafes on 125th if you feel me.

Instead of asking for what we aren’t ready for, we should be working and learning to capitalize on what we are going to get. If not, the urban areas of this country will continue to be looked over as the new “jobs” fall from the sky.

Let me know what you think… Stay Gfited!