While the government makes claims of a job recovery the markets don't agree. The governments hiring of 411,000 temporary census workers made a small dent in our enormous jobs crisis but should those jobs even be counted? These jobs don't produce revenue, they don't create new products or services, they can not be sustained and are funded on the shoulders of tax payers. While these jobs make the numbers look like they are improving they will not produce revenue.
Why are businesses not yet hiring? Because they are not being rewarded to add jobs and will not do so until they can justify the added expense that comes with an expanded payroll. In the 'real world' additional payroll demands additional revenue produced from increases sales. The government's only revenue is taxes and when they create jobs you get taxed. Those jobs that were used to pump up the jobs numbers are expenses to each of us. I don't know about you but if I am going to pay for job creation I would like to get something for my money like, roads, bridges and infrastructure.
Until businesses are rewarded for adding employment, job numbers will continue to suffer.
Add to this, extended unemployment, again funded by the taxpayer- and the situation only worsens. The reality is most businesses are making more money today but the individual worker is not! Fast forward to when the unemployment benefits finally cease, taxes are increased on all of us and watch middle class American continue to suffer despite the recovery.
Despite the impact of temporary census jobs more than 29 million Americans are still without work or forced into part-time work -- that's a real jobless rate of 16.6% (BLS U6). (Leo Hindery Jr.'s more precise estimate is 30.16 million for a jobless rate of 18.8 percent.) Nearly 7 million people have been jobless for over 26 weeks (the "long-term unemployed") -- more than at any time since the Great Depression. We still need more than 22 million new jobs to get us anywhere near full-employment.
Businesses are making money but not hiring. Why? Because the reward is not there. Until government provides rewards for hiring rather than rewards for unemployment and funding jobs that don't produce revenue the job numbers will be problematic.
In the ideal free market, the price of labor determines the amount of employment, or so the theory goes. The new reality is the ability to added employment to produce new revenue not the price of labor determines the amount of employment. The old formula was if the price of labor goes down, jobs will be increase but who wants to take a lower paying job when they can stay home. Businesses don't care how inexpensive the employment is but how much revenue additional employment can create!
Quick fixes like adding 411,000 non-revenue creating census workers cost 90 million and will not change the economic conditions because nothing new is being created. Health care and unemployment benefits don't create jobs they just cause us to increase taxes. If you are going to fund activities make sure you are funding activities that actually create products, services, roads, bridges, infrastructure, and new industry. How much infrastructure could 3 trillion build?
It's time to square up to the jobs crisis as it won't go away by itself. The key to solving the crisis? Move money from handout programs to creation programs. Reward businesses for hiring rather than rewarding people to remain unemployed. If the government is going to spend massive amounts of tax dollars lets make sure it actually creates something and is not just a handout.
Grant Cardone, Best Selling Author
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Time to reset your mindset. In the New Economy it's about creating work that reflects YOUR creativity and passion. What might seem like *low wages* to one person, is another person's unfettered freedom. This person may want to be their own BOSS, low wage or not. Housing costs? What about co-housing, family compounds, smaller cottage style homes? What about moving to another city where the costs are lower than where you're living right now?
We've been fixated on millionaires and billionaires and celebrities for so long that we forget that a lifestyle based on "small is beautiful" is a good life too. It's what we often crave when we travel abroad and want "live like the natives."
The price of food going UP? Take a look at what you are buying now. Did you know that the white of an EGG is rated higher for protein than steak? I pay 50-cents for two eggs that I soft boil and get better protein. Steak costs $10/pound or more ... We could make better food choices, and spend a fraction of what we're spending now.
There is nothing more saddening or devastating than mass unemployment such as existed in countries such as Mexico or India before they industrialized. I have visited Asia many times on Business in the last century where crime, family abandonment, divorce, selling your 12 year old (and younger) daughters to brothels, selling your 12 year old sons to rug weavers, and other bad things increase during these periods of unemployment. The families sell their children as indentured servants (the same as slaves) in order to feed the remaining children. Our basic industries such as steel, computer chip manufacturing, petrochemical refining, appliance manufacturing, tire manufacturing, automobile parts manufacturing, aircraft manufacturing, textiles, and etc. have been decimated and/or totally eliminated from this country by US government Free Trade policies. Without Industry and jobs, this could be the future of a de-industrialized USA.
Housing and food of any kind was a dream for most of the population before they industrialized.
An egg would just be a dream for the majority of the population. Meat was probably never tasted.
The USA must re-industrialize now!
The USA is now almost completely de-industrialized and the industrial companies have fired all of their US employees and relocated their factories overseas rather than comply with the expensive EPA regulations.
Public pressure is being applied to destroy the remainder of our industries and US jobs with the proposed "Cap and Trade" legislation.
Existing environmental laws, and the anticipated costs of future environmental legislation that will be "piled onto" our remaining US located industries (that stay in the USA) will cause the remainder of our industries and US jobs to relocate to overseas locations.
If there is an economic life cycle cost analysis that would allow some US factory to stay in the USA today, the business managers should fire their US workers and relocate that factory to a foreign country in order to escape the costs of the anticipated future environmental regulations that the US government will almost certainly create, and also to take advantage of lower labor costs and more productive labor work rules that are available in foreign countries.
If US citizens are not willing to work for lower wages than the foreigner workers employed in foreign countries are paid, then the USA cannot compete globally based upon lower product costs. If we cannot compete on lower product costs, then maybe we could be competitive internationally through other areas such as superior technology, as the USA did to win WWII and create good jobs for a few of the decades following WWII.
The USA is no longer the World Technology leader that the USA was until maybe the early 1970's. Asian countries are now are the technology leaders. The best & brightest students in the USA have pursued the more financially rewarding non-scientific financial careers, instead of educations that might have created technically innovative products that people in foreign countries might purchase.
The US government does not really borrow US dollars from banks to pay for its expenses that are greater than the taxes that they collect, the US Government actually prints and sells freshly printed paper US Bonds to foreigners to get back the US dollars that foreigners earned by making consumer goods that US citizens consumed.
The freshly printed paper US Bonds that the US government sells to people in industrialized nations to raise money to pay for US government expenses have no value, except that they are redeemable for title to privately owned businesses, factories, casinos, hotels, farms, land, ports, breweries, refineries, forests, ports, breweries, refineries, and other privately owned assets located in the USA that were created by previous productive US generations instead of Gold from Ft. Knox.
Some "economic experts" think that the USA can become a "post-industrial" society of "knowledge workers" consisting of software developers, data analysts, technicians, editors, scientists, lab technicians, teachers, doctors, nurses, architects, accountants, engineers, inventors, lawyers, poets, musicians, historians, philosophers, etc, and still somehow generate sufficient wealth to continue payment to foreigners for foreigners to manufacture the food, shelter, clothing, and the other things that US citizens consume.
How does anyone think that US citizens can get foreigners to pay for (buy) the services of these "US knowledge workers" if their home grown local "knowledge workers" are equal to, or maybe even technically superior to, our "US knowledge workers", especially if their home grown local "knowledge workers" will work for less US dollars than US citizens?
The US government will cause a total economic system collapse and the international value of the dollar will go to zero when the foreigners will have redeemed their freshly printed US bonds and dollars (that we paid them to manufacture the things that US citizens imported and consumed) for title to all of the properties, businesses, and everything else of value located in the USA, and there is then nothing else left to sell to the foreigners to raise more US dollars, and the foreigners will not accept our US dollars for the things that we import and consume.
The jobs for people to work with their hands to repair things (houses, cars, appliances, etc.) will never be outsourced. That is what I thought about construction jobs, but go to any non-commercial job and listen to the language spoken, it is not English. This labor is now imported along with the parts and materials for the job.
I agree that employers should be rewarded for creating jobs, but to deny those of us who have been out of work for months the ability to pay our electric, phone and internet bills so we can keep looking is cruel, myopic, short-sighted, counter productive and down right ludicrous.
We have met the enemy and it is ourselves for destroying the US industries by allowing the US congress to create free trade and environmental federal legislation, and the US consumer will not buy the more expensive US made product.
There will not be any Middle Class in the USA (without manufacturing jobs).
The US government passed "Free Trade" laws that allows US businesses to move their US factories overseas and lay off all of the US employees in order to reduce their product prices to meet US consumer demands (and increase their profits). Why blame the businesses? If a business's competitors take advantage of cheaper foreign labor costs, then the competitor will have less expensive products, and the business with the more expensive products made with US citizen labor will go bankrupt because the US consumer will not buy the more expensive US made product.
Both political parties and their political contributors (and the various importers lobbyists) directed our lawmakers to remove import tariffs that protected the jobs of US citizens working in US industries. This action then created "Free Trade" which is the cause of most of the US factory closings and job losses to overseas locations. The US jobs are not going to be recreated without "Extremely High Import Tariffs" that are high enough to prevent imported products.
What do you think that the future of the US worker will be?
Can we hire the unemployed to research the health care cost issues? Please!!! The New Deal fixed the Dust Bowl. We can do this! We can train more doctors and nurses and fix the shortage. We can fix HIPPA, make an efficient billing system and make sure that we are putting in an electronic records keeping system that allows doctors and hospitals to share information-and if you think we are, we aren't!-and keep records safe.
We could develop green technology and make our economy energy independent. We could hire more teachers for our failing schools and make a real effort to improve the level of education there.
We have problems worth spending money and time on that would improve our economy.
Real wealth, jobs, industry, and real monetary value is created and/or acquired ONLY when the members of a family (or a nation, city-state, island, tribe, etc.) plant, grow and/or harvest something of commercial value from the earth, extract something of commercial value from the earth, provide professional services (medical, legal, dental, engineering, architecture, accounting, land surveying, technology, etc.) and/or manufactures or constructs something of commercial value that is consumable (or permanently useful for income or rent) and then sells, leases or rents these items and/or services to parties outside of their family, in return for a net transfer of gold, currency or commodities from other parties outside of their family into their own family.
The members of that family can reflect their real wealth and financial security with the net positive accumulation of grain, gold, cattle, jewels, land, buildings, factories, commodities and/or other marketable products for reserve use in times of emergency.
Now that we have the recession we have a deflationary spiral, since prices must go down.
Bush ran up a huge debt. He made unwise tax cuts, even into the Medicare surplus in 2000. Then the war started, which was expensive and there was the first recession so he made more tax cuts and on and on. Too much debt is bad and people told him it was bad. They weren't listened too. Go cry to Paul Krugman about it. The debt is not too high for us to borrow a few billion dollars for stimulus efforts. If you think that, you're bad at math. We're borrowing at almost no interest.
The debt is a problem because we have long-term medical liabilities and the war doesn't seem to have an end. These issues must be addressed. At once. Anyone who actual gives a rat behind will be talking about it. Anyone who doesn't is talking about something else. And we have to raise taxes too eventually. Anyone who says we don't, doesn't care about the debt.
You mention the trade deficit. That's important too. Most of our debt comes from imported oil. We should stop freakin' doing that!
Now, the most important part here. Why would the government hiring people to fix medical care in America help the economy:
1. It works as an automatic stabilizer. It is the same as an unemployment check, except they are working. That money is recycled into the economy. This prevents more deflation. Does it "create goods." No, that's not the point.
2. These people are trained in a profession. That is better than having them sitting at home. Knowledge isn't an easily measured econometric, but we know that businesses like to locate where there are more skilled workers and boosts wages across the economy.
3. Health care costs need to be fixed. Cutting government health care services makes everyone poorer because it simply shifts the costs to private consumers, who then don't spend on other businesses or become too sick to work, go bankrupt, ect. Instead, we need to learn to be more efficient.
I await your entertaining response. I hope it involves gold.