By Dianne Anderson

California might get lucky and snap back to pre-recession times when unemployment was a mere 6%, and if all bodes well, that could happen as early as 2018, according to a recent UCLA economic forecast.

One of the nation’s few remaining safety nets, the unemployment extension, was killed last week by Senate Republicans, which may also cut back on some of the nation’s 15 million wraparound unemployment lines.

Still, actual joblessness is believed much higher than the official number, which doesn’t count the homeless or prisoners. Most of the state now sees unemployment bumping 12%, but for low-income communities, especially the Black community, the rate runs at least double white unemployment.

Meanwhile, consumers are holding on to every penny during the stubborn recession, the UCLA Anderson Forecast describes.  And the 167,000 jobs expected to be added this year in California still fall seriously short of plugging the 1.3 million unemployment hole of recent years.

The study’s director, Edward Leamer, projects that unemployment numbers will hover around 8.6% come 2012.

"If the next year is going to bring exceptional growth," Leamer writes, "consumers will need to express their optimism in the way that really counts--buying homes and cars. And that is not going to happen if businesses continue to express their pessimism in the way that really counts, by not hiring workers."

In Orange County, unemployment has declined slightly from 9.5 - 9.2% in April, but Alan Woo, planning director of the Community Action Partnership of Orange County, isn’t exactly impressed.

The recent jobs report shows unemployment was down slightly for private sector jobs, but that doesn’t mean it went down for low skilled jobs, he said. All it takes is a trip through the Black community to see where the jobs are not.

“We have yet to see that in the low-income community. People of color are still waiting to get rehired,” said Woo.

So far, CAP has allocated $600,000, split up evenly between the Workforce Investment Board, Anaheim Workforce Investment Board and the Santa Ana Work Center, to provide jobs for the youths this summer.

It should help in getting youths 18 to 24 years old, to work, but not for long.

“We hired several youths and about 150 new employees, but those jobs are going to be gone using stimulus money [up by] September 30,” he said, adding that he hopes their partnership with Workforce Investment Board will allow them to roll clients over to new jobs at WIB when the recovery dollars end.

“The people who hurt the most are those who went to work everyday, and may not have gotten paid a lot, and so their benefits are running out. They're losing their houses, their savings are gone,” he said.

Consumers are not willing, many more are not able, to spur the economy with spending, which slows recovery, and drags the jobs market, he said.  But CAP, although small, is trying to do its part.

With a recent infusion of stimulus dollars, CAP was able to allocate money to the local organizations that created and saved about 200 jobs from being eliminated.

“We knew that when we got that we’re part of the solution, but we’re not the entire answer,” he said, adding that they didn’t get anything in comparison to what the corporations received. “We have to ask, what are they doing to create jobs?”