When it comes to jobs, it turns out the aughts were for naught. Too bad we can't just party like it's 1999.
This morning the Labor Department issued its final monthly jobs report for the decade just ended. In December 2009, the economy shed 85,000 jobs and the unemployment rate held at 10.0 percent, but only because 661,000 people left the labor force.
So this report makes it official: The last decade was indeed a lost decade for job creation. We're beginning 2010 with just about 131 million jobs, only 129,000 more than at the beginning of the decade. This is despite the fact that the U.S. population has grown by roughly 25 million people since 2000.
As the Washington Post recently reported, the aughts' net zero job growth puts the decade in its own inauspicious category. In each of the six preceding decades, from the 1940's forward, job growth was 20 percent or higher.
It's important to note how we got here. Right-wing economic policies -- and remember that the right wing was in charge for eight of the past 10 years -- emphasized that government was the problem and the market always knew best.
Regulators sat on the sidelines while Wall Street gambled with Main Street's money, inflated an enormous housing bubble and marketed dangerous mortgages. The bubble popped with catastrophic consequences for millions of workers who had, in fact, played by the rules.
The Bush administration passed recklessly irresponsible tax cuts that further enriched the wealthy and handicapped our ability to make investments for a stronger economy -- investments in infrastructure, innovation, and education, which would have yielded dividends for all Americans for generations to come. The results were not only poor job growth but also the only business cycle where the typical working family had less income at the end than at the beginning -- as if recovery never happened.
Rather than attempt to reinvigorate American manufacturing, the right wing pushed for unfair trade deals that lacked protections for workers, forcing Americans to compete for their jobs with workers in countries that lack even basic labor standards.
Conservatives talk about the dignity of work; when they call for gutting the social safety net and workplace safety rules, they do it in the name of empowering more people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and achieve economic independence. Yet right-wing economic policies gave us the worst decade for jobs since the 1930's.
The point here is not only to affix well-deserved blame. The more important point is to make sure we don't repeat the mistakes of the past. Yet the right wing, having overseen a disastrous decade for America's middle class, simply wants to double down on the failed policies that got us here.
Insanity, as Einstein put it, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Viewed that way, the "job creation" proposals floated by House Republicans are truly insane. More deregulation. More unfair trade agreements. More tax cuts for rich people. That's why their respectful rhetoric about the value of work is plainly just talk.
But there is a dignity that can only be found in decent work. Everyone who wants a job ought to be able to find one -- a good one with benefits and a family -- supporting wage. That's why the jobs crisis is not only an economic crisis, it's a moral one.
After two and a half years of rising unemployment, it's time we put people back to work. The initial effort to generate jobs -- the recovery act -- is already helping. But the scale of the problem is much more than that legislation can overcome. We need to do more.
We should put people to work repairing and modernizing school buildings. We should put people to work serving their communities, doing important jobs like maintaining parks, operating emergency food programs, staffing early childhood education centers, and cleaning up the environment. We should provide assistance to states to prevent looming layoffs and stabilize services, which will save as many jobs in the private as in the public sector.
Because the private sector will not start creating jobs in sufficient numbers to make a real dent in unemployment, the jobs crisis will not recede on its own anytime soon. In fact, unemployment is expected to grow throughout 2010. That's why the government has to step in and take bold, aggressive steps to create jobs. The right question is not, as conservatives would frame it, whether government is too big or too small. It's whether government works. And right now it must.
Follow Lawrence Mishel on Twitter: www.twitter.com/EPInstitute
that being noted, of course the author of the post above doesn't want late-stage American capitalism, and niether do I. That doesn't make us anti-capitalism - there is a spectrum of capitalist theories, and a spectrum of socialist theories, each spectrum is broad enough to incorporate theories from the other spectrum. We could if we wished enjoy a moderated capitalism by employing socialistic theories, or the reverse.
In less abstract terms, Mr. Mishel puts the mater quite succintly: "The right question is not, as conservatives would frame it, whether government is too big or too small. It's whether government works." And outside of the hot-house of Washington and its sycophant media, the truth is most Americans are really asking for that, a government that works, and are not very concerned with ideology.
Right now the government isn't working - hasn't been, really for 30 years. I don't know but that the damage done may be beyond repair. But, again, we will not be able to repair it until we face some hard facts.
One of these is that the Democrats pulled a con-job last year, and I fear Nader and Chomsky are right - we have one party with two factions, the Businessman's Party. We need therefore to organize some other political party or social movement outside the hot-house, and to work more actively for change.
Our disagreement would be in the area of third political parties. Multiple political parties splintered the left in Canada and elected a Conservitive Prime Minister with 30% of the vote. Historically, third parties have proven to be too expensive and unsuccessful in the U.S.
I'm not certain any of these changes can be enacted, or that anything will work short of revolution. But revolution is war, so we have to try.
And now we have another President practicing Reaganomics.
The trouble with "trickle-down" theory is that for it to work, most of us need to be in the lower classes so that wealth can trickle-down on us at the elite's liesure. Which by the way is consistent with Calvinist social theory (since most of us are not among God's elect).
To put it bluntly - most Americans are SUPPOSED to be poor, that's how our now highly developed American capitalism works. (The 'pulling yourself up by your boot-straps" days are now long past - that was an era where innovation and hard work helped determined who the new aristocrats were to become - but now they ARE, there isn't any 'becoming' anymore.)
Can we change? sure. But not unless we dispel the myths and see the ideology for what it really means - 10% of the population enjoying 90% of the wealth, high unemployment rates, low-wage jobs, millions enslaved by debt, government by corporations, crumbling infrastructures - these are all part of the package, they're not excesses or abberrations. You want late-stage American capitalism? - you got it!
Neither the republicans, nor the democrats under Obama, address what these trade pacts have done to middle class America. Every election it seems we are simply not given anti-free-trade candidates who we could vote for. So we continue to vote "the lesser of two evils"...and look where that's got us.
There's a few, but just a few, good guys screaming against these agreements and they come from BOTH political camps: Lou Dobbs, Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich: BUT WE HAVE TO VOTE THESE GUYS IN. Ralph Nader said along time ago, that on every ballot in every election there should be a choice to vote for: "None of the Above", and new candidates would need to be found when most people checked off this option on a ballot. I just fear that without a safety valve like this that Nader is talking about, we will forever vote for the "lesser of two evils" and find ourselves in continually more dismal circumstances with each decade that passes.
You disparage Bush without recognizing the destruction caused by Clinton (NAFTA, MFN for China, normalized relations with Vietnam, repealed Glass-Stengal).
You assign blame to conservatives but never consider the American peoples' bloodlust for cheap Chinese 'stuff'.
It's elementary Watson ---
Are we really so insane, that we would re-elect the same cast of characters, again? We would re-elect the ones who brought this country to its knees? A decade of no job growth ??? Wow, what a talking point.
Maybe someone should tell those pollsters, the Republican party crowing maniacs, the power hungry Republican analysts that America is NOT insane.
In fact that would be a great (D) political AD....."Are you insane??? Check off the blocks that tells you whether you are insane or not.
Or....what about this one....Name one single solitarty thing Republicans have every done for the middle class.....or the poor or disadvantaged.. Can't think of one ? Not one ??? Really ???
You are welcome, Dem strategists, for my take.
As soon as the Berlin Wall fell, so did "responsible" capitalism, and what took it's place could best be described as "predatory" capitalism. Under the new regime, you get what you're willing to fight for - period. What ever it is that the working class wants will have to be fought for in the streets, not Washington. Social darwinism came in with llaissez faire.
I say it does matter which party is in office. The Dems gave us Social Security, Medicare, Civil Rights, and a whole host of vary degrees of important legislations.
What have the Republicans ever done for us ????? Taxes breaks for the elite, anyone???
Paul Craig Roberts has beeen saying this for years.
www.nextrevolution.net
People need to quit whimpering, be loud & abusive all together. If everybody put their name on one site so the message is sent is isn't scattered, two parties blaming the other, or weak, we'll be sending a message. This puny bend me over message on blogs no doubt have polticians laughing & nothing will change.
We'd still be in Vietnam if the people who were demonstating then weren't any more forcefull then tea parties whimps now. Tea parties are a joke, in Idaho it's all republican so there is no way the support is there. The United States is divided, we can't win a war against terror when we're fighting each other as both parties have US so they don't lose $ & control. Contributors don't want more parties or they'll have to buy more politicians, & pay millions more.
Do banks & insurance, care if you're republcian or democrat when they foreclose? NO, they don't discrminate, they'll take your home, & we bailed these crooks out? People are being misled, told they'll keep their homes, keep paying the mortgage while the bank finds a buyer then kicks them out, & we aren't