If future job creation reaches about 208,000 jobs per month, the average monthly job creation for the best year for job creation in the 2000s, it will take almost 140 months (about 11.5 years) to reach pre-recession employment levels. In a more optimistic scenario with 321,000 jobs created per month, the average monthly job creation for the best year in the 1990s, it will take 59 months (almost 5 years).~Michael Greenstone, Adam Looney The Long Road Back to Full Employment: How the Great Recession Compares to Previous U.S. Recessions, The Brookings Institution
This may be the first time in American history that the super-rich are experiencing an economic boom while the rest of us are coping with serious economic difficulties. Even during the depths of the Great Depression there was some equality of suffering. Of course, the wealthy weren't exactly standing in bread lines wondering if they'd ever work again. But the rich and the poor both felt the crisis. This time around, it's a Tale of Two Cities: the super-rich are doing just fine, thanks to taxpayer largess, even as the rest of us are staggering through the highest sustained unemployment level since 1937.
Our Wall Street billionaires easily weathered the financial storm that they themselves created. It's as if nothing had happened. The financial reforms Congress passed are weak. The biggest banks actually are bigger. And Wall Street profits and bonuses are approaching record highs. That's in stark contrast with the fact that more than 29 million Americans are without work or have been forced into part-time jobs.
With the Republican landslide, the super-rich have nothing to fear from Congress. No need to worry about tax increases or tighter regulations now. The hedge funds will be able to hang on to their 15 percent tax rate (by claiming their earnings as capital gains) while raking in $900,000 an hour (not a typo). Meanwhile the pressure mounts to cut social spending -- because, of course, we've got to combat the large deficits we racked up by giving tax breaks to the rich, bailing out Wall Street, and dealing with the financial crash that Wall Street created. (We get a deficit commission instead of a jobs commission?)
But the real mystery is how quiet progressives are. We seem constitutionally incapable of facing the enormity of the employment crisis.
As far as I can tell, most liberal advocacy groups are carrying on as if the economy hadn't crashed at all. It's like we're all stuck in our remote silos -- each working on our own separate issues. We have no shared vision, shared programs or shared will to tackle the broader unemployment crisis. We hope the economy will somehow resurrect itself so that we can go on fighting for our favorite cause without any further interruptions.
Meanwhile, the right, especially the Tea Party, definitely is in crisis mode, and they have a plan. In my opinion they have misidentified the crisis - big government and debt - and have the wrong plan -- cut taxes and government spending. But they have a vision, they have passion, and they're not afraid to challenge not only the Democrats, but the Republicans. They've hit on a clever theory to explain the jobs crisis, one that can't be disproved by facts: It's caused by big government's interference in the economy. The solution: slice government spending and regulations so that free enterprise can prosper. And if unemployment still remains high after budget cuts--well, then we just didn't cut enough. It's a perfect Catch 22.
And the rest of us are saying... what? What do environmentalists propose to do about the jobs crisis? What is the women's movement's economic program? What do progressives involved in healthcare or education think we should do to create the 22 million new jobs we need to get back to full employment?
Yes, there's a lot of positive discussion about rebuilding our economy through green jobs and renewable energy. But the scale of these proposals is far too small to put much of a dent in the unemployment numbers. Are we all too afraid to say what's really needed?
We need hundreds of billions of dollars of public investment, right now, paid by taxes on the super-rich.
Why are progressives so timid? Part of the answer lies in our permanent attachment to the Democratic Party. It seems that we can't ever imagine a time when it would be appropriate to abandon or at least openly fight with the Dems -- even those who abandoned us long ago. What will we do as the remaining Blue Dogs move even further to the right, joining with the Republicans on deficit reduction, gutting health care reform, outlawing abortions and stonewalling on climate change? One thing is certain -- the Democratic Party is in no mood to lay out a bold national proposal to create the millions of new jobs we need. Most are tacking to the "center" to avoid the fate of Russ Feingold, the very best of the bunch.
What would a massive job creation program look like?
Let's start with a no-brainer: We hire an army of at least one million installers to weatherize every home and business in the country. Hiring all these workers --at decent wages --through tens of thousands of local contractors will probably add another 400,000 jobs (in addition to the original million) as these re-employed workers spend their earnings. Households and businesses will save on their energy bills, and we'll reduce global warming emissions. The budget crisis facing state governments will ease as tax dollars start pouring in and unemployment insurance claims plummet. We'll trigger an economic upswing that's also good for the environment.
Next, we should fund free higher education at all public colleges and universities, a social good that will also open up the job market by drawing people from the workforce into the educational system. A hiring and construction boom on campuses all over the country will generate a flood of jobs for our millions of unemployed construction workers. This is precisely how the GI Bill of Rights averted what could have been a staggering unemployment crisis after WWII -- a time when millions of returning veterans were coming back home in search of work. Through the GI bill, three million instead went to school. Congressional studies show that the GI Bill returned almost $7 dollars of economic growth for every dollar invested -- probably the best investment the federal government ever made.
We should also invest massively in alternative energy research, in rebuilding and enhancing our infrastructure, and in meeting a myriad of other needs in our communities. Ask every town in the country to come up with ten projects that need doing right now, and then have the federal government fund them. The ripple effect would wake up our slumbering economy.
Oh, but won't all this cost a fortune? Aren't we already tapped out from Wall Street bailouts and the half-assed stimulus program (not to mention two wars)?
Good question -- it gets us to the best part of our in-your-face program. We need to make those who crushed our economy, and whom we so generously bailed out, foot the bill. The American people, I believe, would support a windfall tax on financial profits and bonuses and eliminating tax loopholes on hedge funds to fund the jobs we so desperately need.
Time for a Jobs Party?
Will any of this pass in the near future? Of course not. But it'll never happen if we don't propose what is really needed.
We have no prayer of tackling the jobs crisis until we articulate a clear-cut agenda and start pressing for it. And we can't do it alone. We need a sustained, organized voice independent of the Democratic Party that focuses clearly on the jobs crisis. In fact, we should take a cold hard look at creating a Jobs Party. Maybe, one day, it would become a third party that would truly vie for power. But at the very least it could create the same kind of chaos among the Democrats as the Tea Party is creating among the Republicans. Wouldn't it be nice to see Democratic officials, fearing primary fights, tripping all over themselves to proclaim their allegiance to the Jobs Party agenda?
Right now, the only conversation we're hearing on jobs is a boring rerun of failed neo-liberalism - cut taxes on the super-rich, deregulate big business and pray for rain. Instead, we need to force politicians to engage in a much more aggressive national conversation about jobs. How are we are going to create the 22 million new jobs to get us back near full-employment?
Will it really take eleven years or more, as the Brookings Institution study (cited above) suggests, for us to get these jobs back? That's up to us. A Jobs Party with moxie could speed up the timetable during this new era of joblessness.
Maybe all this sound fanciful and unrealistic. But let's remind ourselves of how fast the world is changing. Did anyone believe that President Obama could go from being America's darling to chopped liver in less than two years? Did anyone believe that a Tea Party would become a "credible" force among more than 40 percent of the electorate by pushing an agenda that died with Barry Goldwater a generation ago?
Actually, the most fanciful path of all might be hoping we can muddle through indefinitely with the Democrats while ignoring the employment crisis as we plug away, day after day, inside our issue silos.
Come on -- let's say what we really believe in before we forget how.
Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009. He is currently working on a new book, How to Earn $900,000 an Hour: The Rise of Wall Street Billionaires and the New Class War, (hopefully to be published in 2011).
Follow Les Leopold on Twitter: www.twitter.com/les_leopold
I agree - just not sure who we can actually push
South Carolina and Oregon--or any other state--have wildly differing needs, and a one-size-fits-all national program has not a snoball's chance in hades of getting passed. South Carolina needs a massive education and re-training effort to meet the needs of 21st century jobs. We need R & D funding to get our hydrogen fuel research off the ground and into production.
If Leopold can let loose of his federal stranglehold on tax receipts, possibly Independents might have something to talk about.
Simply this: the US should adopt "local content" rules. This could be sliced a couple of different ways. Let's say Samsung wants to sell a flat screen TV in the US. The 'local content' rule could say "20% of the components by count must be US made". Another way would be "if you sell 100,000 flat screens here, then 20% of each of the individual components must be made in the USA." including raw matls (plastics, metals). Ratchet that to "xx% of the content plus yy% of the engineering".
We should start very small, 2% or so, then over a decade move to 10% and land somewhere around 30%. Of course, this means prices would go up for us by a lot. But we would be back to work. We probably would also have to abrogate some treaties and potentially retire from the WTO.
What do you think?
That should tell you whether your plan would work.
Just like North Korea.
That should tell you whether your plan would work.
What everyone needs to think about clearly is that ONLY 'employment program' that will work is the program that allows Americans to make (yes, make) stuff that people IN OTHER COUNTRIES will want to buy. Get this through your heads: the people with the money to build factories to employ others are typically NOT American anymore. So, to get non-Americans to invest in US jobs we have to create a climate where they can profit.
That means the sum total package of legal climate, regulation, taxes, wages, benefits, and productivity has to be better than it is in Chinindia. It seems that everyone is focused on this unstated idea that someone "stole" our jobs or "owes us" a job and we are going to "get mad as hell" and MAKE THEM give us jobs!
We are out of work because we don't 'make' anything any more. The owners of the means of production don't live here anymore. Our taxes, corporate and personal, are high. Our regulations are byzantine, strangulating, and often stupid. Further, we tend towards mental and physical laziness relative to our Chindian brothers and sisters.
The biggest single cause of our jobless problem is the relentless off-shoring that's been going on over the years. It was bad through the Clinton years, but the arrival of ultra rapid internet connections make it possible to off-shore not only manufacturing but IT, Engineering, design, architecture, financial analysis, and some medical jobs. Off-shoring and H-1B visas destroy middle class wages here.
And when it comes to off-shoring, there are specific legislators that are at fault. The blue dogs are at fault. the Chamber of Commerce is at fault. most Repubs are at fault. All the senators who voted against the anti-offshoring bill in October are at fault.
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Not surprisingly, in the corporatocracy, unemployment is high even during boom periods where corporate profits are rich and the stock market is high, because of a reliance on offshoring and offshore investment. The corporations always seek out what's known in economic terms as "absolute advantage," which in lay terms means "utter selfishness and disregard for the rest of the US." The corporatocracy cares less about retaining jobs than foreign counterparts, largely due to the influence of the US Chamber of Commerce. The US tax base is eroded as a consequence--those that profit the most in the corporatocracy aren't taxed--and the federal debt climbs quickly, since the US budget system relies heavily on non-corporate federal income tax receipts. In short--no jobs means no balanced budget. And yet the Chamber persists in its anti-US-job agenda--and America lets it.
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As part of its operating model, the corporatocracy generates an increasing number of offshore holding companies, which route US direct investment abroad ("DIA"), first through the EU, and then through yet other entities...finally allowing the widespread propagation of offshored business into low-wage countries like China, India, and Brazil--with low US tax consequences. In addition, the US also offers tax incentives for offshoring--destroying its own tax base. But as for the DIA, up to and throughout the current recession, the rate of growth of DIA in EU holding companies has been brisk. This DIA activity means foreign investment and offshoring has become the "new bubble"--as an alternative to US job creation. It's a bubble because it has disconnected the economic model of capitalism from the welfare and fiscal sustainability of the US.
Much more:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x9554944
We are suffering from a lack of demand due to serial bubbles and concurrent offshoring, along with demographic challenges. We need to tap wealth where it exists, and invest in the US. This will create jobs.
Obviously, if we come out with deficit reduction plans which fail to even identify where the wealth is, we need to start over with a new plan. Hence, Senator Sanders...
There is a hidden truth that no one wants to acknowledge: that with robotics, artificial intelligence------------there are fewer and fewer jobs for human beings.
Each new advance in robotics means more adaptability and reprogrammable flexibility for robots to do more jobs currently done by people. As robots increase in availability, prices for them decrease making them more attractive to businesses of all sizes who are primarily concerned with profits.
Not requiring healthcare, pensions, breaks, or even sleep they become the most perfect employees imaginable--------------rendering, as in the self-checkouts in store, even service people as no longer necessary.
All of which is one of the major reasons why there will probably be a major war in about 20 years . . . . . . .to thin the herd. And many of the killers will be robots.
Our whole system has to move away from profiteering if we are to survive as human beings.
Meh, as robots become more prominent.. what use will be the corporation? If I want something and have the resources.. I can have my robot construct it for me. If I don't have the resources.. there are other planets and other solar systems I could go to. The course of science has alway found a way for humans to require less and less to receive what we need to survive. Same with what we want. I see a grand time ahead for scientist, artists and designers.. When you get down to it.. mass production will be obsolete, which is all corporations are good for.
1) Retire from their jobs, and not seek other employment for a year
2) Buy a new car and a new major appliance
3) Settle a mortgage on a property they hold, or start up a new business
the influx of all the dollars into the economy and the sudden appearance of millions of new job openings would alleviate most of the economic woes. Cost: about 3.4 trillion.
It actually is a very sensible proposal.
In its stead, trillions were given to Wall Street to shore up the already rich.