Virtually Everyone in This State Has a Job

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Sep 19, 8:37AM EDT

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Virtually Everyone in This State Has a Job — © LawrenceSawyer / E+ via Getty Images

The U.S. jobless rate went on a wild roller coaster ride at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The unemployment rate in February 2020 was near a four decade low at 3.5%. That surged to 14.7% in April. It has taken until the last two months for the economy to make up for all those lost jobs. The August 2022 national figure was 3.7%.

The BLS has just released its STATE EMPLOYMENT AND UNEMPLOYMENT — AUGUST 2022. Very few states posted changes compared with the previous month. “Nonfarm payroll employment increased in 10 states, decreased in 1 state, and was essentially unchanged in 39 states and the District of Columbia in August 2022.”
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The jobless rates did vary considerably from state to state. States with the lowest jobless rate tended to be in the Plains states and Northeast. The lowest rate was in Minnesota at 1.9%. The rate in Nebraska and Vermont was 2.1% and in 2% in Utah and New Hampshire.

Only 58,240 people are out of work in Minnesota. That is against a workforce of 3,023,110. Many of the out of work people are between jobs, and are likely to be employed soon. Across America there are millions of jobs that have not been filled.

The primary disadvantage to such low employment is that it tends to fuel inflation. A job market with so few people out of work means that the consumer population in America is at or near all-time high. This means millions of more consumers than the economy had in early 2020. These consumers drive spending, which drives GDP, which drives unprecedented demand for products and services.

The answer to the question of how inflation can be brought under control is higher interest rates according to most economists and central banks. This, in turn, tightens many business margins. And, tightened business margins often lead to layoffs. Famous economist and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers believes the jobless rate may need to reach 7.5% for inflation to be under control.
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Whether Summers is right is a matter of debate. What is not up for argument is that virtually everyone in Minnesota has a job.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.