The Economic Populist
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VAT or Value Added Tax is Getting a Look in D.C.
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US oil supplies at a 36½ year low, SPR at a 39 year low; oil+products supplies at an 18½ year low
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Showdown at the Occupy Wall Street OK Corral
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The Administration Double Speak on Jobs & Exports
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4th Quarter GDP Grew at 2.9% Rate on Increased Inventories, Personal Services, and Government
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The Best of the Best of 2011 LIstomania
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VAT or Value Added Tax is Getting a Look in D.C.
- 345284 reads
US oil supplies at a 36½ year low, SPR at a 39 year low; oil+products supplies at an 18½ year low
- 183612 reads
Showdown at the Occupy Wall Street OK Corral
- 39119 reads
The Administration Double Speak on Jobs & Exports
- 22066 reads
4th Quarter GDP Grew at 2.9% Rate on Increased Inventories, Personal Services, and Government
- 77763 reads
The Best of the Best of 2011 LIstomania
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The Golden Rule
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Will the NY Attorney General Bring Doomsday Charges Against Wall Street? If So, How Long Will He Survive?
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New York Post Claims Census Falsifies Unemployment Figures
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How Many Jobs Are Needed to Keep Up with Population Growth?
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VAT or Value Added Tax is Getting a Look in D.C.
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U3 and U6 Unemployment during the Great Depression
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The war on the middle class
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House discusses 401k/IRA confiscation
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Tax Cuts for the Rich Do Not Generate Jobs
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First, unions do not guarantee jobs. Secondly, high union wages and union benefits will only serve to increase the cost of products and services. And, thirdly, unions will push businesses to either "job out-sourcing", or relocating outside of our borders. Also, union made products open the doors for more cheap foreign imports. The examples to back-up the above statements are the textile, steel, electronics, furniture, automotive, and other industries that were once the backbones of "industrial America".
The truth is, even without unions, we still can't compete with cheap foreign labor markets. So, how does anyone expect us to compete in a global economy with high union wages and fat union benefits jack'in up the cost of goods and services? Also, with the majority of our workforce working for less wages and benefits than it did ten years ago, who will be able to afford union made products and union services? Retail giants like Wal-Mart would love to see union made products become the norm in this country. Unless everyone worked for a union, and made tons of money, the Wal-Marts would greatly prosper from the non-union shopppers. Only union workers can afford union made products. Everyone else has to buy cheap foreign imports.
Unions had a place in the first half of the twentieth century, but they have long since served their purpose. At present, we have labor laws that protect workers. We have OSHA and the EPA that protect workers. Employers pay workman's comp insurance that protect workers. In today's workplace, unions and union workers are all about "greed", and nothing else. Everyone wants to make a $$million bucks a year sweeping the floor and emptying the trash can.
The cost of everything goes up. I can remember going to the store and buying five loaves of bread for a dollar. I can remember seventeen cents a gallon gasoline. I can remember rural undeveloped land selling for fifty dollars an acre back in 1971 in Alabama.
The problem is the real cost of living to real wages ratio. While cost has increased, wages have lagged way behind. Each year, the gap between the actual cost of living and wages widen. Yes, the cost of higher education continues to go up. And, yes, at some point the cost will be unaffordable for most of our population. We can also include the cost of proper medical care in that scenario.
The problem becomes an economic "tug-of-war". One side pulls towards affordability, and the other side pulls towards "inflationary greed". Again, we can reference the "run-away" cost of higher education to the "run-away" cost of proper health care. Both are basically pricing the majority of citizens out of the market.
The loss of the Middle Class has a lot to do with unaffordable higher education. Many families have placed higher education for their kids down the priority list. It's a real struggle for parents to earn enough to pay for the necessities such as mortgages, food, utilities, transportation cost, and health care. At the end of the day, there's little or no money left to send their kids to college. We're living in a time where "the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer" has become a truism and realization.
Another problem seems to be one of "specialized courses of study". It's no long good enough to have just a four year degree. The constant changing demands in the job market often eliminate those with what I'll call "a general diploma". Many college students graduate without a degree that fits the workforce demands. This leaves them with college related debt, and no jobs to repay the student loans.
Of course, the main problem is the lack of jobs period. We've lost our manufacturing and industrial base, which in the past, has provided across the board demand for almost all education and skill levels. The high paying jobs are a thing of the past, and there's not enough demand to satisfy the needs of our many college grads. Thus the reason we hear about college grads flip'in burgers at fast food joints.
The present day wage scales are far behind product and services affordability. The cost of higher education will continue to rise until colleges price themselves into a market reserved for the wealthy only. Remember, greed knows no boundaries. This is true not only concerning higher education, but in many other areas including health care.
This would be a perfect time to harness worker anxiety and discontent and change a lot of workers from anti to pro union. It might not be a good time to unionize -- people might be too scared to annoy employers -- but seeds planted for the future would surely grow well.
But it's not happening.
Many of the people still in unions are in the public sector. Have private sector unions given up?
Just as a matter of resource allocation, their efforts for immigrants seem excessive, since I don't think many illegal immigrants are public service union members.
Unfortunately I think amnesty and continued high levels of legal immigration -- an open borders philosophy by default, because there are objections to every kind of immigration restriction -- has become a knee jerk progressive cause.
What kills me is that when people in government talk about consulting with "labor" it still means labor union leaders. At the very least, the worker bees of America need a large umbrella advocacy organization like AARP -- or even the low key AAA. Such a group would have to be attractive to even people who don't like unions, so I suppose it would avoid many issues. But it would have lots of members, and in numbers there is strength. Anything would be better than to be voiceless and helpless, like we are now.
College costs have been going up like medical costs for years -- way above the rate of inflation.
Yet no one ever seems to look into costs and how they could be controlled.
On the one hand, we know that the use of part time instructors has gone way up, tenured and tenure track fulltime teaching jobs are way down. Yet even small colleges seem to be constantly building new buildings? Why? They don't seem to knock down many old ones, just add and add. So where is all the money going? Have the colleges ever considered that the students might like fewer amenities and lower bills?
The colleges themselves don't seem worried that one day they'll reach a limit on what people can and will pay. Are there really enough people out there to keep all the private ones open if costs go up 5% annually while most Americans' income is staying the same or dropping?
As with all economic and other social phenomena, there is more than one variable affecting the result.
Jobs for college graduates is not only determined by overall job market, it is also a function of the relevance and quality of the education. I can't remember where I read it, but just yesterday there was a Pew Report on the low quality of college education standards relative to the past.
Also, I have read reports about the relevance issue. In short, no matter the degree, if you do not have job SKILLS, then you won't find work.
In part, the so called lost generation is the result of too many students spending too much time in school playing video games.
Has the older generation fail to instill the virtue of "work ethic" in the youth?
What I like is that the 20 somethings are getting out there and agitating. College students and graduates in the 18-24 age group may face less unemployment than others in their cohort but they are part of that group and the figures you presented are devastating. Egypt and Tunesia come to America.
in supposedly college educated professional meant you probably could have a stable career and today that just is not true.
It's like triple whammy, one is the never ending pushing of the costs onto people and the second is no career to pay off those costs and the third is corporations treating professionals now like they used to treat blue collar in the 80's.
I think most of this started in the 80's, layoffs, labor arbitrage, as well.
Is there value to education? Absolutely, no matter what career comes out of it. But is there value for the dollar. It's hard to sell that when tuition is so high.
I'd say this group has the problem outlined well.
The greed is apparently unlimited
The bottom line is simple to understand. It doesn't take an MIT graduate, nor does it take a Philadelphia lawyer to grasp the situation and circumstances. Education doesn't do one any good "IF" there are NO JOBS. We've been exporting jobs away from our economy for over a half century now. The damage has been caused by unfair, unjust, one-sided foreign trade agreements and policies, job out-sourcing, illegal immigration, corporate greed, political corruption, and the selling of America.
Why, why, why, would you shrug your shoulders and say, "Well, at least Bush was up front." The LAST thing Bush was, is above board, on anything!
Oh, don't get me wrong, I would have taken a bullet for Bush in a second, only to keep that Polecat Cheney out of office.
I guess my point is this - are you so scared of something different, maybe a little scary, that you are so willing to just lay down your ideals and principals for a fatcat and vote for the evil YOU KNOW?
Me, I would take a chance on the unknown any day than just accept the evil I know.
To me, this kind of thinking is so flawed, so hopeless, so backward. Could this kind of thinking be what is wrong with us as a culture?
Look into what Bush, Jr's first month in the White House did to our deficit. You seriously expect Obama to walk in and fix this in 3 years?
Oh yeah, and don't forget, you voted in the minority, until brother Jeb got involved and handed him Florida. After all, its safe to assume all those old people would vote Republican, right?
So, did you vote for him both times?
Were you part of the problem, or part of the solution?
I just incorporated those reported statistics from Adecco in the lastest blog post.
In the news today :
About 60% of recent graduates have not been able to find a full-time job in their chosen profession, according to job placement firm Adecco.
Last year, the unemployment rate for college graduates age 24 and younger rose to 9.4%, the highest since the Labor Department began keeping records in 1985.
Adecco also found that 18% of recent grads have been forced to turn to full-time jobs outside their field of study, often jobs for which a college degree is not required.
Many others are underemployed, or working part-time or temporary jobs and internships.
About a third of recent graduates are still living with their parents, Adecco found, with 17% saying they are financially dependant on their parents. Almost one in four say they are in debt.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/17/news/economy/recession_lost_generation/i...
It doesn't seem to be a factor here, but why are IMF people eligible for diplomatic immunity? Who are they 'diplomats' for? The IMF isn't a country, it's more like a business as far as I can tell.
Luckily this guy isn't trying to claim immunity, there would be a huge uproar then.
As we start with the man in the unemployment line and trace back, and keep tracing back until we find the original pathogen, the original root cause of the disease to which he is just a mere symptom, what will we find?
Why none other than the Federal Reserve.
Until we take that non-governmental agency, that cabal of private bankers that masquerades as a government agency, that institution of-bankers-by-bankers-and-for-bankers that is singularly responsible for robbing trillions from the people and shoveling into the pockets of the bankers and global elites, until this unholy den of thieves is cast into the ocean, chopped down root and branch, completely and totally flushed down the toilet, there will be no progress, only increasing despair.
The Federal Reserve is is virtually the sum total of why we're in this mess. They perpetrated the most massive malinvestment binge in world history, the largest transfer of wealth in world history from the bottom to the top.
Everything that must be done fiscally is of great importance, from the revision of the tax code to controls on deficit spending.
Yet it is all pennies on the dollar compared to that unholy cabal that has more than doubled the money supply in the last 2 years and pushed it all into the hands of their friends.
People look everywhere for the radicals. Yet it's right in front of their face and most don't see it - the biggest radical of our time is the little bald criminal who heads the Federal Reserve.
Look at world history. The radicals are rarely in the street, they're on the cover of Time Magazine.
The sad part is the unions are undercutting their own long range objectives and giving the "masters of the boardrooms" an unlimited workforce to continually push down wages and benefits while weakening unions even further in the process
incl with Roseannadana (and your Dad) - but also re the phony austerity push (already a painful failure in Europe). Unfortunately even Krugman is depressed per his blog yesterday - after appearing on This Week - he was the only one pushing against the austerity BS.
Good to see a strong union environment in Korea and hopefully strong pushback against phony "Free Trade" and Globalization (at least as purchased and practiced by the "masters of the boardrooms".
From taking the temperature, beyond the Koch brothers and others in their never ending relenting media campaign against Unions, with their bought and paid for representatives, I see a real problem with the unions in pushing for "amnesty" and that includes rank and file union members.
People see, every day, teenagers not being able to get that summer job, because the job has been taken by illegal immigrants. People working at Walmart, not making enough for rent see illegals getting jobs at food processing plants, at canneries and probably the most dominant, meat packing plants and they are pissed off because they need those jobs.
A meat packer used to pull in about $20 an hour, now it's minimum wage, benefits slashed and use of illegal labor to achieve that labor arbitrage.
Construction jobs, which are decimated as it is by the housing bubble collapse, is also a place where union jobs would pull in a living wage and now these same places pick up "day labor", usually illegal, and pay cash, $8-$12 and hour, no job security, no workman's comp., no nothing.
So, Democrats, literally build "day labor centers", which they are clear violations of U.S. labor law, per the demands of special interests.
I think this, when by labor economic theory, flood labor supply you will get wage repression and worker displacement and anyone saying otherwise, all else being static, is manipulating mathematical equations and making fictional assumptions...
These positions, probably most of all, super piss regular people off and have turned them off to unions generally.
They see unions as representing everybody but them and most of all illegal immigrants and they also seem them as just protecting their own cushy jobs, instead of looking to improve working conditions for all.
Ripe for some special interests to swoop down and claim "unions are bad guys", which is what's happening.
Your observation on the Korean government policy is consistent with the storyline on the Tiger nations. That is why is is all the more interesting to find both union federations attacking globalism and the G20. The 2011 KFTU criticism of "the increased labour market flexibility" and those "suffering from severe employment insecurity" is striking. KCTU is also adamantly anti globalism. Those are the correct criticisms from US worker perspectives imho. Hopefully, we're looking a a more international movement against the phoney austerity programs.
Thanks for the tip on 2011. As Roseannadana said, "It's always something." But, in reality, my father was correct - "A job once well done is twice done."
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