Stepping up to the checkout counter might hurt more this holiday season. For a state where the economy is churning with low taxes and steady growth, North Carolinians have struggled under the weight of inflation in 2023. Headlines are brimming with news of economic growth in North Carolina, although it remains below the national level...
First, the good news: North Carolina’s unemployment rate is reported as being among the lowest in decades. The NC Department of Commerce reported in August that the state’s unemployment rate for July came in at 3.3%, tying two months in 2022 for the lowest rate since 1999. Now, the not-so-good news. For starters, a low...
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics just released its latest jobs report for North Carolina and the rest of the country. As usual, the report contained a mixture of good news and bad. First the good. Our headline unemployment rate of 3.8% isn’t just low. It’s much lower than our 5.3% average rate over the...
Most economic forecasters expect us to enter a recession sometime in 2023. I sure hope they’re wrong. Even a mild recession would throw tens of thousands of North Carolinians out of work. And the ranks of displaced workers would rise into the hundreds of thousands if we suffered a downturn as serious as the Great...
I have my own views about North Carolina’s labor-market woes, but the first step to debating the issue well is to agree on the basic scope of the problem.
A job-placement bonus is a reasonable response, especially as an alternative to a more-foolish expenditure of North Carolina’s federal funds.
Paying people to stay home from work may make sense as a temporary expedient in the midst of an outbreak of communicable disease. But it’s not the right policy now.
While the government counted about 100,000 fewer North Carolinians as unemployed last month, only 28,000 got jobs. The remaining 72,000 dropped out of the labor force.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released “The Employment Situation — April 2020” Friday stating the seasonally adjusted national unemployment rate was 14.7%. But on page three of the report, the agency explains that due to the unique nature of the coronavirus, “the overall unemployment rate would have been almost 5 percentage points higher than...
It is simply incoherent for politicians and analysts who label Barack Obama’s economic record as good to attack Pat McCrory’s economic record as bad.
While North Carolina’s unemployment rate currently stands at just under 6 percent, some argue that problems in the state’s labor market are worse than that one statistic would indicate.
