This is sad news, the unemployment rate for young Americans has exploded to 52.2 percent. There are a number of reasons for this, the bad economic environment being the obvious root cause.

But there are two other factors that aren’t helping. The first is the minimum wage. As recently at July 23, 2007, the federal minimum wage was $5.15. Now the minimum wage is $7.25–a 40 percent increase in just over 2 years. Even though Congressmen can’t figure this out, but when you make it more expensive to hire people without much experience (such as 16-24 year olds), fewer inexperienced people get hired.  I hope these young Americans are thanking President Bush for signing that law…

Second, no one lobbies for policies to help young Americans get jobs. But there are lots and lots of lobbyists working to make sure that people who have jobs keep them. Just look who got the bailouts–Wall Street and the auto industry. Wall Street employs a lot of lobbyist and they provide politicians with a lot of fundraising dollars. The auto industry employs a lot of lobbyists and auto unions employ a lot of lobbyist.

The stimulus bill hasn’t helped either, since it was crafted to help special interest groups. Here’s more from the article:

Al Angrisani, the former assistant Labor Department secretary under President Reagan, doesn’t see a turnaround in the jobs picture for entry-level workers and places the blame squarely on the Obama administration and the construction of its stimulus bill.

“There is no assistance provided for the development of job growth through small businesses, which create 70 percent of the jobs in the country,” Angrisani said in an interview last week. “All those [unemployed young people] should be getting hired by small businesses.”

There are six million small businesses in the country, those that employ less than 100 people, and a jobs stimulus bill should include tax credits to give incentives to those businesses to hire people, the former Labor official said.

There’s a reason the the stimulus bill didn’t give incentives to small business to hire young workers–no one lobbied for that. Lobbyists work to help their own industries.

Our maco-economic situation is the main reason young Americans are struggling, but our policies aren’t helping either.

–the recent increase in the minimum wage.