Indisputably, the American economy is ailing and its citizens are suffering. Beginning with the 2007 recession, most Americans have become increasingly familiar with financial uncertainty, disappointment, and frustration while politicians of both parties have grown adept at packaging blame into sound bites. All but a few insiders and pundits are fed up with the political finger-pointing, and the middle class no longer cares how we got here. They care only about how the nation's leaders are going to create and protect jobs and bring stability to the economy. But the truth is that a return to full employment and stability is not possible unless we acknowledge the problem for what it is and put aside partisan politics to fix it.
So, what is the problem? Nobody wants to say it, but we are riding the unpredictable waves of a Contemporary Depression. It may not look and feel like the Depression of the 1930s because government programs such as unemployment insurance, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, food stamps, and other forms of public assistance have made this Contemporary Depression more tolerable and less visible. Losing your job today does not mean immediate hunger or starvation for you and your family, as it would have 80 years ago. You rarely see homeless children begging on the street, as was commonplace then, and retirement, even if delayed, is still possible for most middle-class families in a way it never was for our parents and grandparents. Nonetheless, no amount of masking can fix the economy's structural imbalances -- imbalances that will be irreversibly devastating unless the president and Congress act decisively.
Since the 1930s, government has worked to provide the fiscal incentives for the creation of jobs for the middle class and has worked alongside the private sector to restore public confidence. Yet in this time of crisis, government has not only abandoned its role in the creation of jobs, it is eliminating them. Every day, layoffs of state and local public servants such as teachers, police officers, firefighters, and a myriad of health and human services employees are reported by the media. Such actions nullify any progress that has been made toward resuscitating the economy. In fact, had these jobs not been eliminated, the current unemployment rate of 8.2 percent would be a full percentage point lower. What is more, when you count those working part-time who want full-time work that includes 18 percent of the population. With 23 million people presently unemployed or underemployed, and four job seekers for each vacancy, it is easy to see how personal despair has translated into frustration with our politicians.
More disconcerting, things are not much better for the employed. Many who work full-time today earn less than they did before the 2007 recession began, and to make matters worse, a college degree is no longer a guarantee of a good-paying job. In New York City 50 percent of all security-guard positions paying only $10 per hour without benefits are filled by college-educated individuals. On average, the net worth of American families fell by 40 percent, from $126,400 to $77,300, between 2007 and 2010, with the number of personal bankruptcies reaching 5 million from 2008 to the present 2009. Add to these trends the more than six million homes that are in foreclosure, the 16 million mortgages still under water, the more than 46 million people relying on food stamps, and the fact that poverty is growing fastest in middle-class suburbs. Is it any wonder that one in every three Americans is poor or near poor and calls to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline increased by 300 percent since 2007? By all accounts, it is a Contemporary Depression.
The devastation behind these grim statistics was avoidable; government has known for several generations how to fix these problems. We have a rich history of presidents who have worked with Congress in a bipartisan manner to confront economic downturns. They did so with a focus on job creation and training aimed at strengthening the nation's labor force. During the Great Depression, Roosevelt put the country to work rebuilding its roads, bridges, cities, and parks. He signed the GI Bill of Rights, providing higher education -- and a path to the middle class -- for millions of returning servicemen. Truman championed the Full Employment Act, promoting "maximum employment, production, and purchasing power." Kennedy committed to retraining workers with the Manpower Development and Training Act. And Nixon delivered the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, putting hundreds of thousands of citizens in public jobs to prepare them for work in the private sector. Yet today, shamefully, more than one million technical manufacturing jobs go unfilled because our unemployed workforce lacks the requisite skills.
Despite bickering over the details, all in all government-sponsored employment and training programs worked; the unemployment numbers went down, the public's confidence went up, and we became a stronger nation. However, for the past 30 years, the economy has been dominated by a crude and unbridled capitalism to which activist government has taken a back seat. As a result, key sectors of the economy -- such as banking -- have been deregulated despite the painful lessons of the Great Depression, now apparently forgotten. As a result America's middle class is rapidly losing ground, and the American Dream is beginning to look like a nightmare.
In short, Americans need work and they need it now. Faced with almost the same situation in 1931, President Hoover chose to balance the federal budget, rather than use the power of government to invest in the nation. The result was a deepening depression. Sound familiar? In the final analysis, it took an activist government during the Great Depression of the 1930s to put Americans to work and create a middle class. Who would have imagined that an inactive government with shortsighted leadership would permit that middle class to be dismantled by a Contemporary Depression?
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Red conservative states have higher teenage pregnancies, lower F.I.C.O. scores, higher obesity, and lower G.P.A scores.
The benefits of being in a state that is more democratic and liberal is the care given to the people that live there. More interest is paid to child welfare, education and health.
The more education you have the better your life is. Brains beats brawn every time. The republicans tactic to pass a voter i.d. law will guarantee republicans stay in office and continue to be able to dumb down conservative states.
The old saying "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink" doesn't hold water for these states because they are drinking the kool-aid whether they want to or not under the premise of voter fraud. All of which has not been proven by FL or any other state. Not one instance.
We need whoever wins the next election to Start Protecting American Jobs and do whatever it takes to bring back the jobs they let go. They've got to give us somebody who will stand up for the American people.
We need to bring manufacturing back to the United States of America and both parties are ignoring tariffs as a way to level the playing field, raise money and bring jobs back home. Let's guess why. Oh that's right, tariff is a dirty word. Hum, maybe it’s that our so called leaders (political leaders) are beholden to the same people who are exporting our jobs.
I guess we should keep letting Corp Boards, Wall Street, CEOs and Foreign Lobbyists promote sending US jobs to countries where they work for slave wages, no benefits, no OSHA safety standards or no real environment regulations. How's that been working for us?
The so called “Global Market Place” is not a level playing field. Companies may have made higher profits by "out sourcing", but they've been putting middle class Americans who are a good part of the world’s customer base out of work.
A global war that destroyed Europe and killed millions.
Before becoming disabled I was very involved with a company sponsored community outreach program targeted at children attending public schools and volunteered as a math and science tutor to high risk children in a local high school. From what I observed the public school system has a very limited understanding of the skills a person will need to be successful in our economy.
But the most frightening observation I made was the vast number of children with dismal basic core skills. They are the masters of accessing the internet but fail to understand how rapidly technology evolves. To many of them gauge success by the number of friends they have on Facebook.
This "battle" between the rich and the rest has been going on for centuries in one form or another and will continue to go on. There needs to be an end to the "battle".
There is only one way to end it and that is to destroy the concept of value, there it is right and reasonable to value human beings or things as being inherently more valuable then another. It is time to destory so called meritocracy.
Most that say get rid of a merit based system are slackers that do little but suck the life out of someone who actually does something...
How bad will it have to get for most Americans BEFORE the politicians realize they MUST do something, or the country will have social and political unrest not seen in their lifetimes?
100 % Debt to Federal Spending, no tax revenue, Feds are out of $$$.
John M. Keynes has left the Room ! Good Luck, Ralph.
The first part of this article was spot-on in its diagnosis. The solutions in the second part was a prescription of .. same old... same old ... that significanlty added to the present problems.
Major missing link omitted in the article on evolution to the current problem is federal debt (currently 16 Trillion and rising). This started with Reagan and grew in good times and bad. Federal debt (along with the growing personal, corporate, state govt debts and federal unfunded liabilities) caused by both parties has caused and exacerbated current problems.
This should be a good time to rethink our economic, social and other models. These models have based our economy on never-ending consumer and military consumption. The two-earner family that was encouraged to feed consumer demand and economy has contributed in major and minor ways to major social issues like divorce, depression and more serious issues like child delinquency, drug abuse, domestic violence and national issues all (rightly or wrongly) as economic-stimulus, including the perpetual state of wars.
Economic planners and social scientists need to work to drop the cost and standard of living; while improving our quality of life and eliminating debt as an essential fact of life.
Bush certainly contributed his fair share and then some to the economic meltdown.
And while Obama is far from what some of us hoped for.....a polarized and dysfunctional Congress has made it virtually impossible for Obama to do much.
IF we started simply by requiring our "free trade" partners to have some sort of "balanced" trade, based on size of economy, population,etc. we could still have basically the same realtionship with China with only MINOR changes. As far as corp crime? The business system in America has gotten so corrupt that third world banana dictatorships look at us with envy. How many "scandals" and manufactured "crises" must we go through before we get that these things are manufactured to steal our national wealth?
Business and not the government creates jobs by making and selling goods and services. Government pays for its bureaucracy by taxing and borrowing investment capital from the citizenry which would otherwise go to growing the productive economy and hiring productive workers.
The government can kill jobs, though, by increasing the cost of doing business and the cost of labor. That is what is happening now.
The solution then is to get the government the hell out of the way, not increase its size and power yet again.
Workers are the Wealth Creators. Capitalists are just skimmers and traders in worker-created and worker-refined wealth. Capitalists play a role, but the economy does not / should not exist solely to serve them.