If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
How can a person with little experience gain experience if all the jobs are going to the people who already have experience? This is merry-go-round type of problem that until someone stops it, it will continue to spin.
Basketball fans know it is possible to break a full court press, get down the floor and score. But right now, small business America and corporate coaches are failing to draw up plays to break the blistering press and are thus failing their team.
Joe Price is one of the main characters in Set for Life, a documentary that follows three Baby Boomers who struggle to recover after losing their jobs in the Great Recession. When the film was completed, Price had been able to return to work in the green energy industry. But his employment saga did not end then.
Without reforming the system, the projection is that by the year 2020, more than 50 percent of the American people will not earn more than the minimum wage.
We're experiencing the burden of austerity economics and the continued scourge of widening inequality. Both are squeezing average Americans. Yet it's impossible to have a buoyant and sustained recovery without a large and growing middle class.
If you look at the current employment numbers there is a quality job out there for just about every graduate -- if only they would have been guided toward courses of study that would give them the skills most in demand.
This deceleration in job growth and deterioration in labor force participation looks a lot like what you'd expect if you hit a still weak recovery with the repeal of the 2 percent payroll tax break and the sequester.
You can't raise a family on minimum wage. And you can't build a nation on the working poor. It is a rough portrait of an American past and a tough vision to push into an American future. But my goal isn't to speak in broad terms.
Being an entrepreneur is not for everyone, just like college is not for everyone. But how do you know if you never even try?
The faltering jobless recovery isn't working for most working families. Over 20 million are still in need of full-time work. Wages and family income are falling. And in this bleak scene, the Obama coalition is faring among the worst.
The energy in the stadium was indescribable, and was heightened as the lead singer of a major local rock band energized the crowd before the event began.
In 2009 book, I argued that advancing technology -- and especially software automation -- would increasingly threaten the jobs taken by college graduates. Economists are now finding hard evidence that this trend has been underway since 2000.
Millennials are asking for balance and flexibility during the job interview. Baby Boomers are vexed by Generation Y and their tether to technology. Generation X is eager for feedback about their work and also quick to provide criticism of others.
Republicans never knew what their districts had gotten from the federal government. Until it was gone. Until after they'd paved it over with the sequester. Now they're stalled in an economically barren parking lot of their own creation.
The road to political and economic ruin for the Democrats began in the late spring of 2013, when President Obama agreed to a budget grand bargain that cut deficits by 2.8 trillion dollars over ten years, deflated a fragile recovery, and left no room for more than token domestic spending on jobs or infrastructure. The cuts were somewhat "back-loaded" -- bigger later in the decade. But in 2014 they took $200 billion out of the budget. According to CBO, that cut the growth rate by a full percentage point. As part of the deal, more Medicare costs were shifted to patients, and the cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security was cut. Both changes, proposed in Obama's own budget, reduced purchasing power by over $100 billion among the elderly -- who surprised experts by backing Republicans by a margin of 59-41, according to exit polls. The 2013 budget deal, according to Roger Hickey of Campaign for America's Future, "left the Democrats with bragging rights as deficit hawks, but not on the real economy."
