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The Jobs Crunch
randall_burns writes "Neither major party is accurately describing or combatting the Jobs Crunch that Americans are facing. Bad immigration policy-and bad trade deals are combining to decimate the middle class in America."
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Since it's so fashionable to compare our policy to the European powers, let's look at some of the numbers. In France, unemployment was 9.3% as of last year. Germany's unemployment rate was 9.7% as of 2 years ago. We had a bubble during the 90s, and it's only expected to pay the price now. The economy moves in cycles and is an extremely complex nonlinear system. To conclusively blame immigration and trade policy as the cause for an increase in unemployment is easy, but unfortunately also meaningless.
The problem is that these men who represent our presidential canidates, are the best that the parties could come up with. Out of everyone in the whole country. These four pricks. Thats insane. If this is the best that the dems and republicans can come up with then we need some different parties invovled in politics.
"The story itself is just a massive advertisement to vote against Bush too."
Why? According to Bush the economy is doing great. If Bush is good for jobs then this thread may be an advertisement for voting for bush. It's only anti bush if Bush is horrible for jobs in the country.
" I know I wont be trying to moderate anyone in this thread, because every second post will look like trolling or flamebait depending on the perspective of the reader."
I have to agree with you there. I have never seen our country divided so much. The people who relish driving wedges to set the country apart have been very successful. I don't know what it would take to get the country back together again. Maybe if we had a president that was a "uniter not a divider" things would be different.
evil is as evil does
It is difficult to be sure from a distance (I live in the UK), but what seems to be happening in the States is a move to what I can best call a neo-feudal society.
At the top end you have the rich and super-rich, with limited call on their wealth in terms of taxes.
At the bottom end you seem to have people who have to hold down more than one job to make ends meet, have limited access to medical care and whose children receive only a poor quality education.
This leaves your middle classes, who are being squeezed. If they don't work in a service that requires personal contact then they are in danger of being outsourced to cheaper locations elswhere on the globe.
Barons, serfs and guilds is the way it appears to be. It isn't quite as extreme here in Britain, but we are going the same way.
Data just came out showing that Cleveland, Ohio has the largest unemployment rate of any major city in the US. Cincinnati is on the brink of (and has fallen into) racial and class conflict. The whole state is an unbelieveable mess and it appears that even with an inept Republican govenor that Ohio will vote Republican and give the rich and corporations more and more tax cuts which they, in turn, will use to buy more foreign products and fund more outsourcing projects.
Distribution of wealth is an nasty necessity that is created by the greed in all of us (once I hit the million dollar threshold I will give to the less fortunate - then it's once I become one of the 331 billionaires in the US -- well you get the drift...). Anyway, the Republicans have never and will never talk about redistribution of wealth. Flat taxes and sales taxes are rigged against the poor, but people seem to think they are a great idea because of conservative thinktank spin.
The Democrats may have become as much of the problem as the Republicans, but at least they are still talking about these issues. I can't for the life of me undersand why a the population of a state on the brink of disaster would vote for a party that still talks about supply side economics and trickle down. I shake my head and then realize that to be a politician these days you have to be rich already -- it's no wonder that we are where we are.
There will never be another farmer from Illinois in the Whitehouse, and I just don't see any solutions on the horizon...
All the layoffs of recent times have flooded the teaching ranks with people getting alternative certification. Add to that a recent flood of people who spent years in other roles in education just now finishing their degrees, and the new teachers are getting pushed out. That whole ETS scoring fiasco didn't help either.
Read again to understand this: there are too many teachers. People in other countries may not understand the gravity of this, but for people who are used to teachers being the most pissed on of American professionals, this should be the ultimate sign of how bad things are right now.
"You're never ready, just less unprepared."
Yeah, it's always the fault of those pesky foreigners...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Well, I never expected to see this story on the front page of slashdot. What next?
Mod parent up!
When the rantings on a xenophobic loonie site are presented as fact.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
5.4 are the latest numbers, the lowest since Oct 2001.
These figures are inaccurate. They don't count people who're no longer collecting unemployment and have simply given up. Many households which formerly had two parents working now only have one parent employed but the government, in it's infinite wisdom, doesn't count these folks as being unemployed.
This is nothing short of 'voodoo unemployment numbers': pretending that people who can't find a job prefer not to work, and therefore don't need to be counted.
We should also note that of the jobs created (about half of those lost so far) the average pay is almost $9,000 lower than the jobs lost. Things are much, much grimmer than our government would lead us to believe.
This isn't new, though. The government did the exact same thing during the Reagan Era depression, declaring that things were looking up despite the fact that, for example, nearly one in three people in Oregon were unemployed and that the few jobs created paid about *one-half the wage* of the timber jobs lost.
Don't trust the government for unbiased numbers; you won't get them.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Yes, we've got a job crunch in this country, and we had a severe job crunch in the dot-bomb technology industry, with an estimated 49% of San Francisco's high-tech jobs disappearing, so my friends were affected much more strongly than the average American, and there's a non-trivial chance I'll get laid off next week.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Thank god for that article. I was beginning to wonder if *I* might be the one responsible for my unemployment due to my choice of remaining in a one factory town, with my limited skill-set, narrow education, zero-ambition and unwillingness to take any job that was far beneath my abilities that can apparently be replicated by someone who grew-up in a third world country without indoor plumbing while educated in a classroom with a dirt floor. I'm so glad I can blame them foreigners and people in Washington. I was almost thinking that I was some kind of loser slacker who spent all my time on message boards downloading music (cause it was meant to be free!) and not trying to make myself into someone with valuable assets. Not my responsibility. There's no way you can convince me otherwise now. Forget the "data", this economy sucks because all my loser friends are out of work too.
I have to say that a lot of issues presented in that article are the same sort of crap that's been tossed around for decades.
For instance, mining and metallurgical refining are extremely high-risk cost-dependent ventures, and they always go wherever is cheapest. My dad's been designing mines for decades, works around the world, and sometimes you can't even get a gold mine going in a place with incredibly low labour costs like Costa Rica! So to point to a shift of refining work to Canada and Mexico as being a fault with NAFTA is just incorrect-- it's exactly what NAFTA was designed to do, in order to make it cheaper for Americans to buy products.
As for Visas, many people on HB-1s, J-1s, etc... leave the U.S. after a few years. They're here for training, and that's it-- and when you consider the legal hurdles that companies have to go through in order to get foreigners (like moi) into the country in the first place, you should realize it's not going to happen if companies could easily find adequately skilled people here in the U.S.
No, I'm afraid what's really wrong with the U.S. job situation is very simple-- there are extreme disincentives for companies to hire new employees if they can make current employees work overtime.
'Fess up. How many of you work overtime for little or NO pay? 50% of you? 75%? How many of your companies had massive layoffs in the past decade, then been very slow to rehire even as the bottom line improved?
I'm good at what I do, and I'm willing to work hard, but realistically, the company I work for should have hired half a dozen more people instead of just me.
The people who want to die, are going to die. They have given up and want me to take care of them, I do not care about these people. I am worried about the people TRYING to find work.
Please do not be a tool. The "given up" remark is something getting said a lot in the media regarding some people who are married and have a spouse who gets laid off and can't find work. The household then learns to get by on a single income, then the pressure to find work is much less. This works and has been popular for the families who will sacrifice that Lexus and drive a Honda instead. This means nothing for the masses across middle america who's factory jobs are gone. So are all the Walmart and McDonalds jobs in many areas.
The men and women who are trying to support families who have had their unemployement benefits dry up do not just "give up" on getting a job. They do anything and everything they can to keep their kids and spouse fed. The only thing they don't do is count towards the damn numbers our government is trying to pass off on us as "getting better". If nobody noticed, more people matured to legal working age than jobs created this year.
Frankly it is tiring, Western Europe and what is today's EU has always respected free enterprise and private ownership, cornerstones of a capitalist economy.
People in the US have no idea what they are talking about when they say EU countries are socialist.
They may be more socially responsible than the US goverments perhaps, but private property and free enterprise has never been stopped.
If you want examples of Socialist countries look at Cuba or North Korea, where everything is Socialized by means of state control and ownership.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
...and a recovery is when George Bush is out of work.
before that, your sister, your friend, and his wife were thinking ... hmmm... perhaps we can go to Europe for a nice vacation, and never realize that their own jobs were hanging by a rope.
Wake up, people.
Don't blame "bad immigration", or "globalization", blame YOURSELVES for being COMPLACENT !
This world we live in is increasingly interconnected. Whatever we'd seen playing in the halls of UN 20 or 30 years ago today is playing right at our doorsteps - and that is, we aren't compete against other Americans for our own survival, but against THE WORLD !
Yes, globalization goes both ways. While the third world countries are whinning about "Developing world conspire to re-colonize us", we, who live in FIRST WORLD COUNTRIES, must realize that while those sons-of-bitches are whinning, their cheaper labor is taking away our jobs.
Usually, we single-minded Americans will yell and shout and demand our "representatives" to "DO SOMETHING" - which, more than always, mean "closing our borders", "stop outsourcing" etc, which in itself WILL NOT WORK ANYMORE IN THIS WORLD WE ARE LIVING.
Instead of closing up, we SHOULD be OPENING UP EVEN MORE, and yes, that means, we should roll up our sleeves and COMPETE AGAINST THE CHEAPEST LABOR IN BANGLADESH, by using OUR BRAIN.
Our plush lifestyle is at threat. If we don't do something, our high cost of living ain't gonna last. We gotta figure out ways to be BOTH the CHEAPEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD TO DO SOMETHING, and THE COUNTRY WHERE WE CAN LIVE In WHATEVER LIFESTYLE WE WANT.
I am saying this base on my experience of a guy who have traveled and worked in all over the world. I am not that type of "Americans" who coccoon himself in the "protection of Uncle Sam". Rather, I go out into the WORLD and see what's going on, and btw, making money at it.
Yep, there are people in the third world countries who will accuse me of "exploitation", but I don't mind. If they won't let me exploit them, then they won't get jobs. It's that simple.
And then, there are Americans who accuse me of "exporting jobs to other countries". Again, I don't mind.
You see, if I can't make a toaster oven in America under U$ 2.25, then I won't make money selling them not only in America, but also all over the world. I gotta find the CHEAPEST PLACE IN THE WORLD to do what I need to do, and if that means doing it OUTSIDE AMERICA, I'll do it in a jiffy.
In the same token, the money I earned, I sent back to my good ol' U. S. of A. for safekeeping. No matter how I like the world outside America, America is still my country.
To to those who want to close our borders - please don't buy any clothing, any furniture, any electrical appliances, any thing, in fact, because 90% of them are MADE OUTSIDE America !
You can close the border to "immigrant, but you can't stop those things from coming in. It's us, the Americans, who demand CHEAP but QUALITY goods, so something gotta give.
Until the day you realize you can't live the way you did, you wouldn't understand which world we are living in, my friend.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I was gonna mod you up, but I decided to post a response instead. Lucky you! I don't entirely agree with your post, so I wanted to blab on about my silly ideas.
n -idea is not going to offshore anything. He is going to find someone local. The easier it is for him to stay in business, the longer that someone local has a job. And, the more people who can start small businesses are more people who can try their ideas out and perhaps start the next industry people will be scrambling towards.
I take serious issue with anyone who wants to try and suppress outsourcing or "globalization" in any way. Not because I think it's good for me personally - it's bad for me personally, as a software engineer in the Silicon Valley... at least in the short term. But this attitude is similar to the attitude of the RIAA who wants to fight the inevitable. The world is changing, national economies are becoming one global economy. You can try and fight it, but we will just be damaging our position in this new global economy. It's going to happen, whether we like it or not. The ubiquity of the Internet that gave us such prosperity in the late 90's has also helped to ensure the inexorable approach of globalization.
The question we has to ask ourselves is not "How do we stop outsourcing/globalization?" The question is "How do we make sure we have a strong position in the new global economy?"
Unfortunately, I don't have any firm answer I can beat people around the head with. It's a hard problem. I have some ideas, though (of course). I think what will keep us fiscally healthy as certain types of jobs become more efficient to export is innovation, pure and simple. We need to encourage innovation and entrepreneurialism, which will not only create new jobs, but new TYPES of jobs, new fields, and new skills that we will have a distinct advantage in possessing.
Assuming you buy that idea at all, the question then becomes, how do we promote that? We already have a culture that encourages individualism, creativity, and risk-taking. I think that's a good start. But we need to focus more heavily on education. We should be more aggressive about the expectations of our children. Perhaps have some government subsidy of pre-schooling. More education about education - make sure kids know what their options are. Anyone that can finish high school can go to a university or a vocational school and get some basic knowledge about a field where there is a chance they will innovate. There's all sorts of loans or scholarships available for people who don't have the money. There are some exceptional people that will be revolutionary no matter what schooling or environment they come from, but innovation will be more common given more rigorous and effective education. I think the government should aggressively fund and incentivize education at all levels.
The other thing that's REALLY important is making it EASY to start and run a small company. Small business is extremely important in innovation, and local job creation. Joe (or Jane) Upper-Middle-Class-with-a-Bachelor's-degree-and-a
I think the US government, in order to protect its country's position of economic dominance over the next 20 years, must take an active role in shaping America into as Educated and Creative a country as it can. Big business leads to monopolies leads to a lack of innovation, competition, and freedom leads to mediocrity and the death of Capitalism. Why does our government encourage big business over small business, other than simply corruption?
Ok, I've started ranting. I'll stop now.
-If
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
You and i know it only takes like 2 days to set up a profitable business that can employ others.
Then do it. Every two days, set up a profitable business employing others. You will be incredibly wealthy and give many people who want jobs a place to work. Or was that just more right-wing bullshit -- the kind of unsubstantiated thing that Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly says because it sounds good but isn't really true at all?
All he did was state data, interpret, and generalize. He indicts rebuplicans and the current administration for corporate decisions; democrats for their failure to understand their constituents. He is assuming the Kerry-Edwards campaign will succeed in November by advising them in what they should be doing, manage the trade defecit and immigration. By doing so will magically grow the middle class and their disposable income.
For being an economist, why doesn't he understand that and unemployment rate of 5.4% is very good and one of the lowest in the world. Its certainly better than the double-digit numbers in most of the world and certainly this overall number from India.
As for the shifting of capital and the growing divide of the classes, name one successful society, where the controlling power had a monetary policy will divide the currency exactly among its citizens. Just one... Nope? I didn't think so. The closest example I can think of is the USSR, and they still had the rich elite controlling the working class; and it only lasted 70 years.
Last time I checked, my blue-collar, low-wage friends and I all have the same opportunity of wealth as the rich kids we tend to resent. Notice, I did NOT say that it would be easier because often capital is more difficult to obtain, but we have the same basic opportunity to start a business as the next person. We have the greatest entrepreneurial environment in the world and its ours to take advantage of. People from other countries see this and other advantages our country offers and immigrate. Is the global playing field level? No, it never has been and it never will be. Life is not fair. Life is hard. Get over the idea of being employeed in one place for your entire life in a job that a trained monkey or robots can do.
Will the election in November help? No. Its just a corporate sponsored figurehead with a puppet administration. Either one. What about a third party? Well, we effectively shut them out a generation ago and now, they're just a talking point.--Amigori
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
Check the date on that one. IIRC Bush changed how the government collects it's data by purposefully underfunding and cutting certain unemployment tracking programs.
Let's face it - the gang in power is just a bunch of "Cheap Labor Republicans." They are gunning for your job because it can be done cheaper somewhere else. These guys make money by keeping labor costs down, not by a a booming economy that benefits you or yours. Catch a clue.
Political Reality Redacted
Several months ago I watched Joe Hough, President of the Faculty and William E. Dodge Professor of Social Ethics at the Union Theological Seminary, speak on Bill Moyers "Now" and I was immediately impressed by both his passion as well as the following statement that he made:
HOUGH: The growing gap between the rich and the poor which has become almost obscene by anybody's standards, and the stated intentional policy of bankrupting the government so that in the future there'll be no money for anything the federal government would decide to do. http://www.pbs.org/now/printable/transc...print.ht ml
Now some of you may be thinking that the above statement is somewhat extreme, and I used to wonder about that myself. But the statement haunted me. The reality is that some of what our current government is doing only makes sense if you consider "bankrupting the government" their actual goal. Have they not reduced taxes for the top 1%? Have they not also run a record deficit? When is a tax cut not a tax cut? When you run a deficit.
The bottom line is that it seems to be okay to run a deficit paying off federal war contracts to Halliburton, but god forbid they should run a deficit supporting job creation programs. And you'll forgive me if I don't consider the expansion of our military "true" job creation.
So what are they really doing? Why are they doing it? You have to ask those questions because it would be a mistake to assume that anyone, esp. an apparent imbecile like Bush, acts without purpose. The appearance of the dolt just might be the mask of a sly con man.
So who has the answers? There's this one guy that has it completely nailed. His stuff is so savvy, so on point that it is frankly scary in it's simplicity and clarity. So don't hesitate - go read it. If you can't handle it all at once, pace yourself - but read it, all of it. It's just four pages: two long, two short. And the rest of the site is excellent too if you still need more.
"CHEAP-LABOR CONSERVATIVE" ISSUES GUIDE
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/blurbs.htm
CATALOGUE OF BOGUS CONSERVATIVE IDEAS
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/bogusideas.htm
"PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY" AND WAGES
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/wages...bility.h tm
THE WRATH OF THE MILLIONAIRE WANNABE'S
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/milli...nnabes.h tm
What's all this about in a few short sentences?
Labor is the true engine of any economy, wealth is not (it is the mere distribution of the results of labor). A boom economy benefits anyone that works for a living because labor is then scarce and labor is valued more highly. Those at the top require cheap labor to maximize their profits - so they hate boom economies. Everything our government is doing right now is intended to devalue labor. The unequal distribution of vast amounts of wealth into the hands of non-laborers makes democracy almost impossible (which is why the founders favored limits on almost everything that concentrated wealth into too few hands).
Let it sit with you a while and you will begin to realize that it explains everything from bad schools, pri
If what you used to do doesn't earn the living you want, be creative, be an American and "change" your output into creating something other people want to buy.
Stop feeling sorry for yourself - get over it, AND do something different until you are employed.
Ah, the vague tripe of the right-wing. Chest-pounding patriotism backed up with hollow, unspecific recommendations, based on the false premise that changing careers has zero cost and can be done overnight.
Some guy who's worked on an assembly line for 26 years or some woman who's been employed as a customer service rep at a phone bank for 12 probably can't afford to start their own business or even go to school to learn some new skill. Perhaps you think that their families should live in refrigerator boxes under bridges while the ex-breadwinners get the training to change careers. Even if they did change careers, they'd be back that the bottom rung of the ladder in their new field, probably making very little money and facing tuition loans on top of that.
Then you ignore the fact that most people don't have the intelligence to quickly change careers, start their own businesses, and learn a whole new set of skills. Any economic plan that requires that everyone be of above average intelligense is destined to fail.
We Americans have a right to protect our jobs. And we have the means to do so.
This economic treason by the elites all started decades ago when they shipped out our advanced manufacturing jobs to Japan. Advanced manufacturing jobs are not assembly jobs, but more like fabrication jobs. See this article for more info.
Now they are doing the same thing to office work (like software, financial etc) that they did to advanced manufacturing. But we office workers are more able to stop them this time, mainly because we have some access to the media via the internet and boards like Slashdot.
Tariffs do make things worse, but only for the upper income group. For the average working person, tariffs are good.
Let me ask you something: if free trade is so good for lowering prices, then why is an average car costing more of the average salary now than it did 25 years ago? For more details on this check out Marshall Brain's Concentration of Wealth blog.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Labor costs are the PROFITS of the worker. You don't hear business owners complaining when their profits get too high, do you?
Look, the highest standards of living in the world are in the social demcracies of Europe, and they have HIGH labor costs--they have minimum wages levels of like $12/hour. High lahor costs are a GOOD THING...IF, and ONLY if you are a WORKER. Now, if you are an investor or business owner, that is a Bad Thing.
Fortunately, over 90% of Americans are WORKERS. Your problem is that you have been tricked by investor/corporate propaganda into thinking that YOU are an INVESTOR. Well, you AIN'T an investor. YOu are a WORKER. Deal with it. Accept it, and then help organize your country to HELP THE WORKER, like they do in Scandanavia.
The reason the 3rd world IS the 3rd world is that they have LOW LABOR COSTS. That is the DEFINTION of being 3rd world.
The reason many of the countries in NW Europe have the highest quality of life is because they have the HIGHEST COST OF LABOR. And it aint no accident. The two concepts are DIRECTLY RELATED.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
FDR tried to alleviate the suffering caused by
the depression's very high unemployment rate by
instituting SS, and work programs like CCC and WPA
that provided a public benefit. He did not make
lies, half-truths, and political doublespeak
an Executive Branch SOP. He did not slash
corporate taxes, and the tax rate of the very
wealthiest Americans, and then shift the tax
burdeon onto the backs of the shrinking
middle class. FDR did not encourage the flight
of American jobs overseas because "what's good
for General Motors is good for America". FDR
did not open the floodgates of illegal
immigration into this country to force wages
lower.
George W. Bush has done all these things, and
more. It is pretty sad when the only decent
paying jobs available to unemployed Americans
is to drive a truck through Iraqi free fire
zones. The high point of Bush's "job creation"
record was 135,000 new jobs in a month -- which
unfortunately doesn't even cover students from
high school or college entering the job market,
let alone those unemployed. Bush has embraced
"corporate national socialism", and abandoned
the working class. From all reliable accounts,
one of the Bush administration's top policy
goals was the invasion of Iraq, from before his
inauguration. All the lies and doublespeak that
was employed (WMD, terror links, and "imminent
threat" were cobbled together and used after
9/11/2001 as cover for this war. Each have
proved to be false. The Bush "war plank" was
an agenda hidden from the voters in 2000 by
such promises as "no foreign wars", "no nation-
building", etcetera, all while planning for
Saddam's ouster. Bush mismanagement of the
war in Iraq, and of domestic policy decisions,
have been equally disasterous to this country,
with the sole exception of the GOP-aligned
multinational corporations. George W. Bush
spoke the truth (finally) at a Washington,DC
fundraiser when he said "the HAVE's and the
HAVE MORE's are my base (constituency)".
If this country should be cursed with yet another
George W. Bush term of office, do not expect that
there will be any improvements in job growth,
health care, international relations, or the
war in Iraq. Do expect more tax cuts for the
corporations and wealthiest 2% of taxpayers.
Do expect SS and Medicare to be gutted, as Bush
finds new ways to drive the country deeper into
debt. Do expect greater loss of personal freedom
in this country, as "Patriot Act" extensions
are subverted to crush political opposition.
Do expect Bush to continue promoting religious
organizations as the only source of welfare
and social assistance. Do expect America's
open borders to continue to encourage illegal
immigration, because America's businesses
want ever cheaper labor.
"He [FDR] not only turned a routine recession into the great depression..."
:-)
When FDR entered office the unemployment rate was 25%, with an underemployment rate of 50%. [...] calling the economy of 1933 "a routine recession" is idiocy.
No it's NOT! I heard it on Rush Limbaugh and again on Fox News so it MUST be true!
All right! Really? So by Tuesday I'll have a nice profitable business?
Oh wait. First I need money to pay for an office to hold my new employees. Plus, I'll need money to pay for the employees. And I'll need money for whatever supplies are needed for these employees to do their jobs (computers, products, etc).
Oh, and then I'll need time finding the place to rent, supplies and employees. In addition, I'll need time to plan out what business I'm going into, as well as strategy to make it profitable.
Hm. Yeah, that ain't happening in 2 business days even given my full weekend head start. I might be able to muster up enough grocery money in 2 days, not enough money to start a business.
Did you really think about this comment before you posted it? I think you meant it takes two days for a rich person to set up a profitable business, with the previous months spent in planning.
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_faq.htm#Ques5
Now, if you look at the qualifications for collecting unemployment, you'll see that unemployment eligible people are a proper subset of "unemployed" people. If you're unemployment benefits ineligible, you're not considered "unemployed." So the poster you were disagreeing with was exactly right in saying that the figures "don't count people who're no longer collecting unemployment and have simply given up.."
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
The problem here is that we are shifting from a colonial economic system to a global one, and we've kept the worst part of both.
If you're going to have a global system, then you must adjust the relative value of human labor, so that the quality of life is elevated for the poorest, and the whole world isn't reduced to a huge slave shop. Just as we balance monetary worth between nations and currencies, we need to set up a fair trade balance in wage differential across nations to insure that the quick and the greedy don't just use this as an opportunity to make a cash grab (in the form of human value), and cause an economic implosion. This needs to be a slow process, allowing for global equalization to occur, at the same time we need to insure that trade and the flow of wealth is balanced so that the nations economy remains robust and flexible.
The current outflow of 'Dollars' is unsustainable. The current rate of increasing unemployment for American workers is unsustainable. What happens when every, job blue and white, collar is taken by either an illegal immigrant, or a foreign national working outside the country? What happens when the only jobs available in this country pay minimum wage? What happens when tens of millions of people have no way of finding work at all, no way of contributing to the economy, and are a drain on the national infrastructure? As the tax base erodes, how are government services provided? How do we prevent lawlessness, crime, ignorance, when government infrastructure begins to collapse? That's not a moot question. A small town on the California central cost just closed it's city government, Salinas has let go of over half it's city employees, and the kindergartens in Monterey have gone from an average of 20 students 4 years ago, to over 40 per classroom now, and teachers are terrified, because there have recently been a number of cases of 5 year olds wandering off of school property because there is no way for one person to watch that many young children.
Your idea about education is a good one, sadly, money for education is being cut across the board all over the country. A recent report describing the increased cost of education and the quickly dwindling money available for supporting education, is forcing student with resources to settle for less, and students without resources to settle for nothing at all. Add to that, a general educational system more intent on making people docile and obedient, than actually giving them anything that vaguely resembles knowledge, and you have one more critical ingredient for what is quickly becoming a global disaster.
As for small business... how do you start a small business if the middle class is gone and you have no local customers? Are you going to start off with a global business from the get go? If so, how will you compete against a third world country providing the same service as you for 10% of your cost? Your ideas are good, they just can't happen in the world that is getting made, they are literally impossible, if the current trends follow to their conclusion. The worst part, is that the European and Asian economies are intimately linked to ours. If we go down, we're taking the entire first and second world down with us. We'll be faced with an economic disaster that makes the great depression look like misplaced chump change. The current Libertarian Presidential candidate had some brilliant ideas, returning the country to a strict adherence of the constitution, fixing the big mistakes we made with corporations and bringing back a high level of personal responsibility to both business and society. Separating business from state, just as we separate church from state. Making government service the thing it was originally intended to be, a means to serve, not a means to get rich or empower lawyers/business/the highest bidder.
I am of the mind that all people everywhere need to be free, safe from harm, safe from violence, safe from slavery. I am of the mind that every person on earth should have a nom
The illegal Mexican immigrants are NOT squeezing the middle class in any way. There is nobody in the middle class that would their jobs.
Several researchers have actually said the illegal immigration is good for the country, from the job market perspective, that is. Sure, illegal immigration brings other problems, but they sure as hell aren't taking any jobs away from the us middle class.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Corporations and Investors want a Race to the Bottom, which increases profits by decreasing wages and benefits. The end result will be a large amount of wealth concentrated in the hands of a few.
Workers want a Race to the Top by increasing wages and benefits. THe end result here will be a large amount of wealth dispersed into the hands of many.
As we can see here on Slashdot, the real problem we have is that the wealthy and the corporations have funded a network of think tanks and foundations that have spent the last 30 years spewing propaganda to make everyone think that a Race to the Bottom is good and that a Race to the Top is Bad. And most Americans (and most Slashdotters!) are buying into the corporate propaganda!
It just goes to show you the power of propaganda over a long period of time--if you spend billions of dollars saying that black is white and white is black, that after 30 years, you will have a bunch of people walking around telling you black is white and that high labor costs and protective trade laws are bad....
THe details of the this RightWing/Corporate propaganda machine are starting to be made public. You can get more info about these "Tentacles of Rage" in the lastest edition of Harpers Magazine here.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
The level of economic activity is not the whole problem. The problem is shifting wealth away from the middle classes and lower classes and towards the wealthy. Liberal H1B laws do not help the American people but they do help American businesses. Low taxes on capital gains, dividends... while there are very high taxes on wages (combining income tax and social security) means the American tax system is anti-progressive.
Then do us all a favor and stop pretending that you're an American.
This is the rhetoric we've come to. "If you support outsourcing, you're not an American," and others... "If you criticize the government..." "...if you don't submit to a full body-cavity search and background investigation before boarding a plane..." etc. etc. you are not an American.
I SWEAR that I am not deliberately invoking Godwin's law here, but think about it. Getting the country afraid of unseen enemies, and promoting unquestioned nationalistic mindset is exactly how, over the course of a few years, Nazi Germany came about. I would HOPE that American society is intelligent enough to stand up and see what is happening, and stop it, before all civil liberties are lost. I don't think Bush is a dictator in waiting, I don't think we're sitting here compacently waiting to become a fascist state. However there can be no question that as we go down this avenue of language and mindset, bigger and bigger breeches of freedom will be justified in the name of security or patriotism.
THAT IS A BAD THING.
I totally agree with your measure of "worth" as how long you have to work to get something.
But you have to compare apples to apples - same timeframe, and same relative framework. it's not helpful to compare a 1st world economy to a 3rd world economy (except to remind oneself how good we currently have it in North America).
A better comparison might be cost of shelter - how many days one has to work for a month's rent (or a month of mortgage, utilities, property taxes)
But two very key things;
First, we only have to work a couple hours to buy shoes... because we don't make them anymore. We get the 3rd world and to make them. ditto for alot of consumer goods. The price we pay is artificially LOW and we are going to get it between the eyes when we run out of cheap labour to exploit.
And second... since we still do have it relatively good... we should be INVESTING AS A SOCIETY in things that will insure future well-being - eg education and research. As a class, the thing rich people are mostly good at is staying rich. Giving them more wealth via tax cuts in this day and age... makes them wealthier, period. They are not reinvesting in things that produce jobs.
So I agree that we have it good, but we're on the wrong course for keeping it good... unless the intent is to maintain our wealth through world domination and intimidation by force (military and capital). Which doesn't seem to be working so well, lately.