Las Vegas: Too Many Dealers, Too Much Bad Credit, Just the Right Number of Lawyers
Talk about fake news. The Las Vegas Sun reports Sin City has too many dancers and dealers and not enough teachers and engineers. The Sun’s Ric Anderson cites Bureau of Labor statistics, which equates the economies of every city.
Those findings come from comparing Clark County to metro areas nationwide focusing on a ratio measuring the concentration of workers in 36 different employment categories. The ratio, known as the Location Quotient, calculates the local concentration of workers in various categories compared to that of the U.S. as a whole. So an LQ of 100 percent means that the local workforce in that category is exactly what you’d expect to see in any other community. The higher the number, the bigger the local workforce comparatively, while anything less than 100 percent means a relative shortage.
Good grief, we have 3,165 percent more gaming dealers than the average city. Go figure!
We’re loaded with dancers, with 1,960 percent of what Average City U.S.A has. How could that be?
Perhaps what’s most interesting is we have more than our fair share of Marriage and family therapists, at 146 percent and who knew Vegas was brimming with Anthropologists and archaeologists, 150 percent.
Boohoohoo, we’re lightly burdened with Legislators at 11 percent, Urban regional planners at 42 percent, and Social scientists at 45 percent.
Mr. Anderson doesn’t seem to have his head around the idea that people go where jobs in their particular specialty are. For instance loggers will tend to congregate in the northwest, where the trees are, not in Las Vegas. For instance, he concludes, “But as the statistics suggest, we’ve got a long way to go to diversify our workforce and protect ourselves from another 2008-like crash.”
That’s it. If more Legislators, teachers and urban planners would just move to town, we’d be ready for the next crash.
But, of course, you’re wondering, because The Heavy Hitter is in your face every time you turn on the tube, and Chad Golightly stars down upon you while you drive by one of his dozens of billboards, do we have too many lawyers?
Nope. 100 percent. Perfect Just an average American city.
What Vegas doesn’t have is good credit. Eli Segall reports for the LVR-J, “Las Vegas residents have an average credit score of 640.41, according to personal-finance website WalletHub, which ranked the city in the 13th percentile of the 2,534 communities it analyzed.”
Experian says, “A 640 credit score on the FICO score scale of 300-850 is considered fair. People with this credit score may be considered subprime borrowers and may be offered higher interest rates or less ideal terms for credit cards and loans.”
In addition to sketchy credit, lots of Las Vegans are unbanked or underbanked. “As the FDIC defines it, an unbanked household does not have a checking or savings account; underbanked homes have an account but also used a pawnshop, auto-title lender or other alternative financial services in the past year; and fully banked households have a bank account and did not use alternative services,” writes Mr. Segall.
With just under 20 percent of Vegas homeowners underwater on their mortgages, “Some 10.1 percent of Las Vegas-area homes were unbanked [in 2015], up from 6.9 percent in 2013; 29.1 percent were underbanked, up from 25 percent; and 55.1 percent were fully banked, down from 62 percent.”
Just under 5,300 people turned their drivers’ licenses in December, settling in the second chance capital of the U.S.
Give us your dancers, dealers, deadbeats and unbanked!
