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The US Department of Labor released December unemployment statistics on Friday. The holiday-filled month came with a lower national unemployment rate of 9.4%. Last month white adult men saw a decrease in unemployment, but women and people of color saw virtually no change. In addition, the number of people unemployed for more than 27 weeks stayed about the same at almost 6.5million, or just over 44% of the total population of out- of- work Americans. The slight decrease in joblessness reportedly fueled upbeat comments by President Obama in a speech to a group of manufacturing workers in Landover, Maryland on Friday. President Obama credited tax cuts and business incentives for the small economic improvement. There remains much speculation about what will spur a speedy recovery, and the forces that collude to shut people out of jobs. One theory about unemployment making the rounds, and even being repeated by the President, is that workers are just not skilled enough to fill vacant positions. Economists and others advancing this position say workers do not have the levels of education or necessary skill-set for the current openings in the market. A co-authored article in the most recent edition of Dollars and Sense magazine examines the fallacies of this argument. John Miller and Jeannette Wicks-Lim write that a so-called skills deficit theory fails to find support through statistics and economic measurements, but it does succeed in scape-goating unemployed Americans.

GUEST: John Miller, Professor of economics at Wheaton College, and co-author of the forthcoming book, Economic Collapse, Economic Change: Roots of the Economic Crisis and What To Do About It

Read the article online at http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2011/0111millerwickslim.html.