Last month the U.S. added 379,000 jobs, a sign that the economy is trending toward recovery. Of the jobs added last month, 355,000 positions were added in the hospitality and leisure sector, an industry that was one of the hardest hit during the pandemic.
While February was the second straight month of beating job growth expectations, the White House says the country is "far from out of the woods," in terms of job recovery.
"The job market is still 9.5 million jobs down from where it was a year ago. By the way, that's 800,000 jobs worse than the depth of the Great Recession, so we are just awfully far from out of the woods," Jared Berstein, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told Cheddar.
Furthermore, Black and Latino Americans are facing stagnation or even a rise in joblessness. The new report shows the rate of unemployment for Black Americans actually went up 0.7 percent last month while the jobless rate for Latinos fell only 0.1 percent to 8.5 percent.
"We have four million people stuck in long-term unemployment," Bernstein added.
While job growth for the country as a whole is improving, Bernstein said dissecting the job reports is key to understanding the entire story. As Americans wait on the Senate to debate over the most recent version of the American Rescue Plan, the White House has said parts of the plan directly address communities of color where joblessness has been rampant and others have had to work riskier, essential jobs through the pandemic.
"Now for those on the bottom leg of the K of this disparate K-shape recovery, unemployment insurance has been important," said Bernstein noting enhanced unemployment benefits are about to expire disproportionately affecting communities of color. "The American Rescue plan keeps them going."
An independent watchdog within the IRS reports that while taxpayer services have vastly improved, the agency is still too slow to resolve identity theft cases. And National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins says those delays are “unconscionable.” Erin M. Collins said in the report released Wednesday that overall the 2024 filing season went smoothly, though IRS delays in resolving identity theft victim assistance cases are worsening. It took nearly 19 months to resolve self-reported identity theft cases as of January, and Wednesday's report states that now it takes 22 months to resolve these cases.
Amazon.com Inc. surpassed $2 trillion in market value for the first time in afternoon trading on Wednesday. The push higher for Amazon’s stock market valuation comes a little more than a week after Nvidia hit $3 trillion and briefly became the most valuable company on Wall Street. Nvidia’s chips are used to power many AI application and its valuation has soared as a result. Amazon has also been making big investments in AI as global interest has grown in the technology. Most of the company’s focus has been on business-focused products.
Climate change doesn’t just mean more extreme weather – it also leads to billions of dollars in lost productivity, tourism, and stresses infrastructure.
