Teenagers who looked for work last summer were out of luck. The teen unemployment rate rose to a record high of 25.5 percent in August of 2009, up from 23.8 percent in July. This was more than ten points higher than the record 9.7 percent national unemployment rate announced in September of 2009. The teenage unemployment rate last year was at its highest level since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping track of such data in 1948.
This chart comes from The Wall Street Journal via Carpe Diem
That’s a pretty stark chart, isn’t it?
Of course, people will argue that correlation isn’t causation and to a degree they’re right, but the numbers don’t lie and that logical fallacy argument only looks like trying to explain away the obvious.