With the holiday shopping season upon us, Americans are holding their collective breaths for an economic turnaround, but one statistic suggests that more tough times are ahead.  According to the Labor Dept., the unemployment number for Americans aged 16-24 is now over 53%, the highest it’s been since WWII.  Of that statistic, black youths are shouldering a disproportionate amount of the burden, ringing in at a stunning 34.5%.  The future of America isn’t starting slow, they aren’t even leaving the gate.  

With so many baby boomers who have lost millions in investments and 401k’s, those just entering the work force can get lost in the shuffle.  While forclosures make the headlines, a very real harbinger of our long range economic health lies in a freshly minted work force who can’t get started.  Many entry level jobs have been taken by older, more experienced people willing to take a pay cut just to pay the bills, thus forcing out high school and college grads looking to get their start.  Youth is an easy segment to overlook since they often have more in the way of fall back options then someone further along in life.  Young adults may have parents that they can live with, they often don’t have kids to feed or mortgages to pay, and they can skate on things like health insurance.  The trouble is that, as economists have recently pointed out, the youth in a recession can take between 10 and 15 years to recover.  

Last September in an article in the New York Post, Heidi Shierholz of The Economic Policy Institute suggested that the current crop of 16 to 24 year olds will be a generation that won’t do as well as there parents.  It is not uncommon for youth to bear the brunt of joblessness in a recession.  There is less money for internships and training programs and, at least in the entry level range, less job availability.  It’s a difficult situation for an employer to face, a young college grad verses an experienced veteran of the work force, but denying work to the young has very real long term consequences.  A 15 year setback for young workers means that less big ticket purchases will be made down the road-cars and houses and such, which are major forces on the economy-and less big ticket purchases means less economic fluidity.  It is a sort of perpetual behind the curve situation.  

Worse yet is the picture among African American youths.  According to an article in the Washington Post, young black men with clean records are equally as likely to get a job as a young white man fresh out of prison.  Forget a future with a dearth of big ticket purchases, how about future with minorities pushed so far to the fringes that crime becomes the best alternative.  The sad truth is that, despite the election of a black president, black youths are still more likely to grow up in impoverished, racially segregated neighborhoods.  Crime is not a question of ethnicity, it is a question of opportunity.  When one ethnic group is forced into a situation of limited opportunity, the results are rarely positive.  Keeping ethnic minorities out of the workforce will do little to improve the economic segregation that persists in this country.  

If nothing else, such bleak economic fortunes for those just starting out breed a cynicism that may be hard to dissipate.  As anyone who has not been living in a cave can attest, cynicism is a swelling commodity, one that will prove detrimental to not just economic health, but eventually emotional and even physical health.  Al Angrisani, former assistant Labor Dept. Secretary, suggests in the Post article that tax breaks for small businesses are the answer, since small businesses will do much of the hiring of the young.  It is at least one possibility in an otherwise anemic landscape of options.  One trend among recent college grads is to go abroad to teach.  This offers a chance to gain skills while waiting out the recession.  But the options for those looking towards more blue collar fare are slim, especially when so many Americans who’ve already logged time in the work force are hurting.  How do you tell a man who is losing his home to move over for someone young because the future depends on it.  The future doesn’t mean much for those who are struggling in the present.  Just further evidence that until more jobs are created, things will continue to look pretty bleak.