sorry you guys but this is econ reality, use of guest worker Visas and illegal immigration and just plain flooding the labor market.
I believe meatpacking wages, used to be heavily unionized, about $25/hr and now it's loaded with illegals and the wage is the minimum wage.
Sorry, but this is true, in fact Harris Miller crafted the labor arbitrage strategy in the 80's to bust the Farm workers unions by using illegals.... and one has to deal with the facts on the ground. (this is part of the issue here, I think everyone on this site is Pro worker/Pro labor but if one denies what's happening, I don't see how anyone can fix anything).
Large corporations age discriminate in mass as well believing somehow (why I don't know) older workers cost more than younger ones. Ever see someone 60 who wasn't in the executive class working inside a large corporation?
India has put a lot of pressure and there is something going on that doesn't even make economic sense (the contracts are more expensive than just keeping the jobs) as well, so to bring back jobs obviously there will be cries of "protectionism" as well as breaking contracts, but I think somehow India's BPO industry (business process outsourcing), has somehow bribed governments in the first place.
So, I think it's corruption. Same with guest worker Visas. These things have been proved to be "offshore outsourcing" visas as well as obviously makes zero sense (there really is an unskilled labor shortage in the U.S.?) I think the unemployment rate in Silicon valley is about 11.8%. (a lot of technical people).....
so these are demanded by a host of special interests, esp. once again...the Indian BPO industry. I'm not sure exactly who is demanding H-2B (unskilled labor) Visas but the claim there is a shortage of unskilled labor is a very obviously incorrect claim at this point!
To me, this is a no-brainer to not use taxpayer funds to pay for offshore outsourced jobs.
For example, in NY, they fired teachers, earning about $43k a year and replaced them with contracts where the total cost was $250k/yr. Now obviously they did not use guest workers because it was a cost savings. (the guest worker doesn't get that money, it's the contract holder, the guest worker is probably earning more like $35k a year)
Came up with an unemployment rate of 11.7% by using a 5 year rolling average of the labor force. Not a bad idea actually.
One thing is clear other bloggers are coming out with a lot of data crunching (same as above) showing there this 10% unemployment rate or "flat" rate just isn't so in reality.
It makes zero sense to me to dump in $787 billion dollars and not stop offshoring federal and state jobs. Those are already funded with tax dollars as it is.
It's like they have a garden hose to stop a fire with a whole fire department down the street which they refuse to call.
First, I don't think this proposal is a sinister way for Federal government to capture and create a new market for its bonds. However, I do think it is a questionable way to pad fees for Wall Street and financial sector by creating these annuities.
The problem the proposal is attempting to address is the one that people are outliving their savings. The much bigger problem is that people are outliving their savings because we didn't save enough in THE FIRST PLACE. That is where our entire retirement system dominated by 401k plans is really screwed up and only benefited Wall Street and the financial sector.
Acccording to the most recent National Retirement Risk Index, 51% of households will not have enough retirement income to maintain their pre-retirement standard of living, even if they work to age 65. This is a huge problem. And this proposal is addressing the wrong problem, IMO.
We need to address the problem of insufficient retirement savings FIRST.
The whole is too deep for half-ass measures. I hate to use this metaphor but its applicable in this situation - part of [Collin] Powell Doctrine - when engaging in a war, such as one against unemployment, every resource and tool available should be used to achieve decisive force against enemy.
We held back on the stimulus. We didn't shoot for full employment. The excuse was that it wasn't politically feasible. A common excuse we are hearing from the Obama Administration. Translation: we lack the courage and the leadership to rally the country around such a stimulus plan and then ram it through congress.
Could very well be an outlier though, but what bothers me
(maybe there is a statistical delay) but last I saw imports for the U.S. were down.
Contained within the 2nd hand news reports are things like 13 million cars bought, massive purchases of iron ore, oil and then they blew past Germany as the #1 exporter, so is it just one month outlier or is this significant?
even more ridiculous are the news reports that somehow this is going to lead the entire globe out of recession. Well, last I heard a trade deficit subtracts from U.S. GDP, and those raw commodities are coming from places like Brazil (the imports), so ...
From the Wall Street Journal on line:
"China's exports last month surged 17.7% to $130.7 billion as imports grew to $112.3 billion, resulting in a trade surplus in the month of $18.43 billion, data issued Sunday by the General Administration of Customs showed. China's exports last grew on an annual basis in October 2008.
For 2009 as a whole, China's exports were down 16% at $1.202 trillion, while imports slid 11.2% to $1.006 trillion, customs said."
It does not seem like one month increase (if I understand this correctly) is anything to worry about especially if they are down for the year. Everybody seems to be talking about inventory restocking so maybe that's all that is involved here. One month may be a 'outlier'.
An interesting addendum to that is that over the previous decade the majority of banks' loans were consumed with mortgage loans (estimated at over 70% - obviously to make money for banks with the slicing and dicing of said mortgage loans into all those CDOs).
Thus, where was the capital coming from for small business? Doing re-fi's on their homes? Couldn't have been the venture capitalists, whose investment plummeted, and then they were normally interested in fast-moving startups?
So, Americans are cutting up (or could be defaulting too) their credit cards.
Supposedly banks are tightening lending but from what I see, the TARP/Zombie banks are busy trying to make "payday loans" a normal thing and it isn't working out too well.
i.e. jacking up interest rates to loan shark rates on people with perfectly good credit.
What kills me about these press releases is how Americans are viewed simply as consumers. Many articles cannot connect up the dots that one needs to have money, income to borrow more money.
those economists who wrote about it, the primary category which they measured unemployment then was an approximation of every able bodied, adult American male, who was actively seeking fulltime work but couldn't find any.
Today, thanks to Reagan, the military is counted on the employment roles, thus skewing the numbers.
Today, thanks to Clinton, part-time workers (including temp categories) are counted under the employed category, thus skewing the numbers.
Also, we the BLS consistently lowering the actual numbers by claiming that a specified number have "given up" looking for employment.
Clearly, when the percentage receiving unemployment benefits have exhausted them ("officially" supposed to be half of the unemployed), when a certain number become homeless, are living in their cars or RVs, or coach surfing among their relatives and friends, it is highly doubtful they have "given up."
The problem has been that debt has been, for thirty years, the faux economic engine of the US, as the economy was being dismantled. Debt is responsible for the egregious number of debt-financed billionaires, whom the PopCultureMedia likens to financial wizards, when all they've been doing is peddling debt (the modern age's Snake Oil) and shoving that debt unto the rest of us, with grievous consequences.
As long as there was rampant securitization going on, then all those mortgage loans, and auto loans, and college tuition loans, ad infinitum, could continue -- which was why the prices rose and rose and rose, generating all those layers of securtization, and securitized financial instruments (CDOs, CBOs, CMOs, CLOs, CDSes, ABS CDS, etc., etc., etc....) generated false markets and market size.
Thus, the economy faltered on, when in actuality the original economic engine -- the manufacturing and R&D base (R&D having been extremely offshored along with everything else; just check declining corporate research investment in academia over the past thirty years) was being dissolved -- or more rightly cannibalized and sold off by the vultures of predatory capitalism.
Ergo, big business killed free enterprise. There are other economic alternatives, ones more suited to democratic economics.
Oh boy, this brings up an entire new topic, how to plain make illegal these sorts of numbers games where it's more profitable to destroy a company which is adding to GDP, employing people and adding to the national interest.....
I'm starting to really despize these sort of fictional money schemes which are getting rich real fast on pretty much nothing....
but on the other hand, it's our government, Congress, which sets up the rules which makes such nonsense possible.
Sounds like a real good find on the book must read list!
I just went through a calculation exercise in this post. Now on the 661k, that's the drop, seasonally adjusted, of the civilian labor force for December 2009.
The labor participation rate is calculated from civilian labor force divided by the total non-institutional civilian population.
Midtowng is using not seasonally adjusted numbers for his post (the entire thing).
Where he is getting these numbers is table A-1 and looking at the not seasonally adjusted change for the category not in the labor force, which is 1,027,000 and seasonally adjusted 843k.
The definition of not in the labor force is
a catch-all for anyone who is not counted as employed or as unemployed.
This includes anyone who does not qualify to be counted in the civilian labor force. Who is dumped into this category?
Military
Homemakers
Elderly (retired)
Students
Seasonal workers
The civilian labor force is defined as those who are considered employed or not employed. It excludes military personnel.
Fantastic catch, midtowng, and in conjuntion to this, I can't help noticing that private equiteer, Peter G. Peterson, recently founded the Fiscal Times, which will probably be pushing Peterson's long term major goal of privatizing Social Security and Medicare.
Peterson, co-founder of the leading private equity firm, the Blackstone Group, also founded the Concord Coalition, the Peterson Institute for International Economics (formerly the Institute for International Economics) and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, all working towards those same goals.
Not content to plunder and pillage companies both national and international, Peterson seeks to plunder the tax coffers of the American citizenry.
...that their securitized notes they used as repayment will probably end up as valueless, as they are essentially based upon the value of AIG, and, most of all, that AIG is probably now being used as an option scam on the stock market.
we could see the % of foreign held versus domestic ownership of debt drop. I'm just saying, because if this works, they will expand upon this. Mark my words, one day you could see Uncle Sam mandating that like Selective Service, you MUST sign up for an annuity the moment you start working in life. Oh yes, the required amounts will be small when you first start your working life, but expect them to index it. If one couldn't cash out with this Uncle Same Annuity (USA?!) Fund, then this would just be another tax.
sorry you guys but this is econ reality, use of guest worker Visas and illegal immigration and just plain flooding the labor market.
I believe meatpacking wages, used to be heavily unionized, about $25/hr and now it's loaded with illegals and the wage is the minimum wage.
Sorry, but this is true, in fact Harris Miller crafted the labor arbitrage strategy in the 80's to bust the Farm workers unions by using illegals.... and one has to deal with the facts on the ground. (this is part of the issue here, I think everyone on this site is Pro worker/Pro labor but if one denies what's happening, I don't see how anyone can fix anything).
Large corporations age discriminate in mass as well believing somehow (why I don't know) older workers cost more than younger ones. Ever see someone 60 who wasn't in the executive class working inside a large corporation?
over the last 25 years. The best way to do that is through outsourcing, offshoring and destroying unions.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
India has put a lot of pressure and there is something going on that doesn't even make economic sense (the contracts are more expensive than just keeping the jobs) as well, so to bring back jobs obviously there will be cries of "protectionism" as well as breaking contracts, but I think somehow India's BPO industry (business process outsourcing), has somehow bribed governments in the first place.
So, I think it's corruption. Same with guest worker Visas. These things have been proved to be "offshore outsourcing" visas as well as obviously makes zero sense (there really is an unskilled labor shortage in the U.S.?) I think the unemployment rate in Silicon valley is about 11.8%. (a lot of technical people).....
so these are demanded by a host of special interests, esp. once again...the Indian BPO industry. I'm not sure exactly who is demanding H-2B (unskilled labor) Visas but the claim there is a shortage of unskilled labor is a very obviously incorrect claim at this point!
To me, this is a no-brainer to not use taxpayer funds to pay for offshore outsourced jobs.
For example, in NY, they fired teachers, earning about $43k a year and replaced them with contracts where the total cost was $250k/yr. Now obviously they did not use guest workers because it was a cost savings. (the guest worker doesn't get that money, it's the contract holder, the guest worker is probably earning more like $35k a year)
Came up with an unemployment rate of 11.7% by using a 5 year rolling average of the labor force. Not a bad idea actually.
One thing is clear other bloggers are coming out with a lot of data crunching (same as above) showing there this 10% unemployment rate or "flat" rate just isn't so in reality.
so that is why they don't want to ban offshoring or 'buy american' provisions.
And what about some serious plan instead of just a shot gun approach to the stimulus.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
It makes zero sense to me to dump in $787 billion dollars and not stop offshoring federal and state jobs. Those are already funded with tax dollars as it is.
It's like they have a garden hose to stop a fire with a whole fire department down the street which they refuse to call.
First, I don't think this proposal is a sinister way for Federal government to capture and create a new market for its bonds. However, I do think it is a questionable way to pad fees for Wall Street and financial sector by creating these annuities.
The problem the proposal is attempting to address is the one that people are outliving their savings. The much bigger problem is that people are outliving their savings because we didn't save enough in THE FIRST PLACE. That is where our entire retirement system dominated by 401k plans is really screwed up and only benefited Wall Street and the financial sector.
Acccording to the most recent National Retirement Risk Index, 51% of households will not have enough retirement income to maintain their pre-retirement standard of living, even if they work to age 65. This is a huge problem. And this proposal is addressing the wrong problem, IMO.
We need to address the problem of insufficient retirement savings FIRST.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
The whole is too deep for half-ass measures. I hate to use this metaphor but its applicable in this situation - part of [Collin] Powell Doctrine - when engaging in a war, such as one against unemployment, every resource and tool available should be used to achieve decisive force against enemy.
We held back on the stimulus. We didn't shoot for full employment. The excuse was that it wasn't politically feasible. A common excuse we are hearing from the Obama Administration. Translation: we lack the courage and the leadership to rally the country around such a stimulus plan and then ram it through congress.
Even, this $75 billion being proposed is weak.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
would be useful.
Could very well be an outlier though, but what bothers me
(maybe there is a statistical delay) but last I saw imports for the U.S. were down.
Contained within the 2nd hand news reports are things like 13 million cars bought, massive purchases of iron ore, oil and then they blew past Germany as the #1 exporter, so is it just one month outlier or is this significant?
even more ridiculous are the news reports that somehow this is going to lead the entire globe out of recession. Well, last I heard a trade deficit subtracts from U.S. GDP, and those raw commodities are coming from places like Brazil (the imports), so ...
From the Wall Street Journal on line:
"China's exports last month surged 17.7% to $130.7 billion as imports grew to $112.3 billion, resulting in a trade surplus in the month of $18.43 billion, data issued Sunday by the General Administration of Customs showed. China's exports last grew on an annual basis in October 2008.
For 2009 as a whole, China's exports were down 16% at $1.202 trillion, while imports slid 11.2% to $1.006 trillion, customs said."
It does not seem like one month increase (if I understand this correctly) is anything to worry about especially if they are down for the year. Everybody seems to be talking about inventory restocking so maybe that's all that is involved here. One month may be a 'outlier'.
An interesting addendum to that is that over the previous decade the majority of banks' loans were consumed with mortgage loans (estimated at over 70% - obviously to make money for banks with the slicing and dicing of said mortgage loans into all those CDOs).
Thus, where was the capital coming from for small business? Doing re-fi's on their homes? Couldn't have been the venture capitalists, whose investment plummeted, and then they were normally interested in fast-moving startups?
Some more Federal Reserve data.
total down 8.5%
revolving down 18.5%
So, Americans are cutting up (or could be defaulting too) their credit cards.
Supposedly banks are tightening lending but from what I see, the TARP/Zombie banks are busy trying to make "payday loans" a normal thing and it isn't working out too well.
i.e. jacking up interest rates to loan shark rates on people with perfectly good credit.
What kills me about these press releases is how Americans are viewed simply as consumers. Many articles cannot connect up the dots that one needs to have money, income to borrow more money.
an extremely low personal savings rate. Debt and a low personal savings rate have exhausted as economic drivers.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
those economists who wrote about it, the primary category which they measured unemployment then was an approximation of every able bodied, adult American male, who was actively seeking fulltime work but couldn't find any.
Today, thanks to Reagan, the military is counted on the employment roles, thus skewing the numbers.
Today, thanks to Clinton, part-time workers (including temp categories) are counted under the employed category, thus skewing the numbers.
Also, we the BLS consistently lowering the actual numbers by claiming that a specified number have "given up" looking for employment.
Clearly, when the percentage receiving unemployment benefits have exhausted them ("officially" supposed to be half of the unemployed), when a certain number become homeless, are living in their cars or RVs, or coach surfing among their relatives and friends, it is highly doubtful they have "given up."
The problem has been that debt has been, for thirty years, the faux economic engine of the US, as the economy was being dismantled. Debt is responsible for the egregious number of debt-financed billionaires, whom the PopCultureMedia likens to financial wizards, when all they've been doing is peddling debt (the modern age's Snake Oil) and shoving that debt unto the rest of us, with grievous consequences.
As long as there was rampant securitization going on, then all those mortgage loans, and auto loans, and college tuition loans, ad infinitum, could continue -- which was why the prices rose and rose and rose, generating all those layers of securtization, and securitized financial instruments (CDOs, CBOs, CMOs, CLOs, CDSes, ABS CDS, etc., etc., etc....) generated false markets and market size.
Thus, the economy faltered on, when in actuality the original economic engine -- the manufacturing and R&D base (R&D having been extremely offshored along with everything else; just check declining corporate research investment in academia over the past thirty years) was being dissolved -- or more rightly cannibalized and sold off by the vultures of predatory capitalism.
Ergo, big business killed free enterprise. There are other economic alternatives, ones more suited to democratic economics.
Oh boy, this brings up an entire new topic, how to plain make illegal these sorts of numbers games where it's more profitable to destroy a company which is adding to GDP, employing people and adding to the national interest.....
I'm starting to really despize these sort of fictional money schemes which are getting rich real fast on pretty much nothing....
but on the other hand, it's our government, Congress, which sets up the rules which makes such nonsense possible.
Sounds like a real good find on the book must read list!
I just went through a calculation exercise in this post. Now on the 661k, that's the drop, seasonally adjusted, of the civilian labor force for December 2009.
The labor participation rate is calculated from civilian labor force divided by the total non-institutional civilian population.
Midtowng is using not seasonally adjusted numbers for his post (the entire thing).
Where he is getting these numbers is table A-1 and looking at the not seasonally adjusted change for the category not in the labor force, which is 1,027,000 and seasonally adjusted 843k.
The definition of not in the labor force is
a catch-all for anyone who is not counted as employed or as unemployed.
This includes anyone who does not qualify to be counted in the civilian labor force. Who is dumped into this category?
The civilian labor force is defined as those who are considered employed or not employed. It excludes military personnel.
Fantastic catch, midtowng, and in conjuntion to this, I can't help noticing that private equiteer, Peter G. Peterson, recently founded the Fiscal Times, which will probably be pushing Peterson's long term major goal of privatizing Social Security and Medicare.
Peterson, co-founder of the leading private equity firm, the Blackstone Group, also founded the Concord Coalition, the Peterson Institute for International Economics (formerly the Institute for International Economics) and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, all working towards those same goals.
Not content to plunder and pillage companies both national and international, Peterson seeks to plunder the tax coffers of the American citizenry.
They never quit......
A great column on this subject, by Roger Hickey, can be found at the Talking Points Memo blog site.
...that their securitized notes they used as repayment will probably end up as valueless, as they are essentially based upon the value of AIG, and, most of all, that AIG is probably now being used as an option scam on the stock market.
we could see the % of foreign held versus domestic ownership of debt drop. I'm just saying, because if this works, they will expand upon this. Mark my words, one day you could see Uncle Sam mandating that like Selective Service, you MUST sign up for an annuity the moment you start working in life. Oh yes, the required amounts will be small when you first start your working life, but expect them to index it. If one couldn't cash out with this Uncle Same Annuity (USA?!) Fund, then this would just be another tax.
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