Danny Newell, an unemployed logger, at his home in Indian
Township, Maine, on Oct. 2, 2013. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
Fixing America’s Unemployment Crisis
Trump was elected in part on the promise of creating jobs, but
how about those who stopped looking for work?
What has been called a
“quiet catastrophe” has been unfolding in America: the
collapse of work for millions of America’s men, and, more recently,
for America’s women as well.
Nicholas Eberstadt, the
Henry Wendt Chair in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute,
estimates there are 10 million men who are jobless and no longer looking for
work. According to calculations using 2014 data, an estimated 3.6 million women
are in the same situation.
President-elect Donald Trump
has announced a raft of policies meant to spur economic growth and create jobs,
but thought needs to be given to what specific measures might help this urgent
situation.
How to address this crisis depends
on what one understands the problem to be. A graph showing the prime-age
employment rate for men provides a kind of Rorschach test for possible
responses.
Jared Bernstein, senior
fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, former economic adviser
to Vice President Joe Biden, and author of, most recently, “The Reconnection
Agenda: Reuniting Growth and Prosperity,” focuses on the cyclical upturns in
the jagged line, on those periods of prosperity when workers regain jobs that
had been lost.
Eberstadt focuses on the
straight trend line, which has been going inexorably and disastrously downward
for decades.
Bernstein and Eberstadt
represent two typical and contrasting approaches to the unemployment
problem.
If you look at the employment rate for prime-age workers,
they have actually clawed back two-thirds of their losses since the great
recession.
— JARED BERNSTEIN
Bernstein published the
graph in a chapter he contributed to Eberstadt’s book “Men Without Work,” in
which he critiques Eberstadt’s diagnosis of the employment crisis.
For Bernstein, the key is a
missing demand for labor.
“If you look at the
employment rate for prime-age workers, they have actually clawed back
two-thirds of their losses since the Great Recession,” Bernstein said in an
interview. “That doesn’t sound to me like a group that has given up. It sounds
to me like a group that is not facing ample opportunity.”
For Eberstadt, the problem
is a detachment from work.
Using various government
databases, Eberstadt gives a composite portrait of those men who are out of the
workforce and not looking for work.
They don’t read newspapers,
seem to have few familial responsibilities, and tend not to be involved in a
church or their communities. They spend most of their time entertaining
themselves with TV or hand-held devices; 31 percent admitted to survey takers
that they used illegal drugs.
Bernstein counters this
portrait by noting that the causal connection may go from a lack of employment
opportunities to suffering from depression, which then leads to these men
planting themselves on the couch.
As to the individual motives
of the non-working, Bernstein said, “We just don’t know.” His advice to Trump
is to aggressively pursue full employment, which involves the federal
government using a number of different tools.
Stimulus and Subsidies
Bernstein believes the key
to the downward trend his graph shows is the disappearance of manufacturing
jobs. He favors trade policies that will reduce America’s chronic trade
imbalances, which will create more demand for domestic manufacturing.
Bernstein also favors an
infrastructure program, with the caveat that “you have to do it right,” he
said.
He would like to see the
federal government get involved in communities that “don’t have enough
businesses, child care slots, supermarkets, and stores—these are a classic
market failure.”
The federal government could
subsidize private employers in these neighborhoods, giving them an incentive to
move their businesses there.
Bernstein also favors
special efforts to help those with a criminal record, and Eberstadt agrees
finding ways to help this population is key to addressing the problem of
non-working adults. He estimates that, by the end of 2016, there will be 20
million with a felony conviction in their past.
Bernstein supports the Ban
the Box initiative, which calls for removing the box on employment applications
that must be ticked by anyone with a criminal record.
He also would like to see
direct job creation. The federal government would offer a heavily subsidized
wage, and at the local level there would be training for specific jobs that
would be available in that area.
He would also like to see
the federal government fund an apprenticeship program, which would involve
recruiting local businesses.
Finally, Bernstein wants to
see the federal government get the macro economic policies right to support
full employment. This means using monetary policy—primarily interest rates set
by the Federal Reserve—and fiscal policy to stimulate the economy. In
Bernstein’s view, we took our foot off the pedal of fiscal stimulus too
soon—the United States should have carried larger deficits in the years
following the Great Recession.
Small Business
Eberstadt said it is “small
not big business that employs most Americans.” Over the last eight years, he
said, there has been only marginally more small business births compared to
small business deaths. A healthy labor market will be one with “many, many new
businesses being formed,” he said. Part of the solution? Undo regulatory
strangulation and rationalize the tax code.
While Eberstadt agrees that
manufacturing jobs are important, he would urge the Trump administration not to
“fetishize” manufacturing jobs. The percentage of manufacturing jobs in
developed economies around the world has steadily dropped. “Jobs that employ
people are good,” Eberstadt said, “whether they have the word manufacturing in
them or not.”
In order to protect the
manufacturing jobs we do have, Eberstadt urges that we not get into a trade war
with China, Mexico, or other countries, saying that trade wars lose jobs, they
don’t create jobs.
Clearly there has been a change in the way most people
think about what is decent and appropriate for able-bodied, working-age men to
do with their lives
— NICHOLAS EBERSTADT, economist, American Enterprise Institute
Because our entitlement
programs are administered locally, they tether people to the states in which
they are receiving benefits. Finding a way to cut that tie will give people
mobility, which will open up more job opportunities.
Eberstadt’s book is meant to
initiate “a broad conversation on our ‘men without work’ problem, a
conversation of many voices and differing perspectives.” One important solution
is to bring this mostly invisible problem “into the public spotlight.”
Shortcomings in the data we
have limit the kinds of conversations we have. The Bureau of Labor Statistics
does not count the 13.6 million people who have stopped looking for work as
unemployed. When the American public is given an unemployment rate of 4.9
percent, the crisis of the non-working is hidden from them.
The government surveys that
are conducted do not reveal the mindsets of those men who are disconnected
from work—vital information for anyone who wants to understand this crisis. The
Social Security Disability Insurance program does not have an effective audit
that would tell us whether it is being used as a substitute for employment
insurance.
Stigma
Eberstadt notes that
relevant context for the crisis of the non-working is a change in our society’s
“mores, and viewpoints, and motivations.”
“Clearly there has been a
change in the way most people think about what is decent and appropriate for
able-bodied, working-age men to do with their lives in their prime working
ages,” Eberstadt said.
Over half of non-working men
in their prime years are getting money from at least one government disability
program, according to Eberstadt. These funds, Eberstadt writes, finance the
non-working’s decision not to work.
He would like to see these
programs have a work requirement, as was done 20 years ago with single mothers
on welfare. Requiring work stigmatizes non-work and so provides a moral
incentive for individuals to move off the couch and back into the workaday
world.
Bernstein writes he
sees “no good for making these programs less generous or further conditioning
them on work.”
Stigma, Eberstadt said, “is
often a kinder and gentler way of achieving social objectives than police
power.”
HIS
CRAP ON BORDERS AND HIS PRETEND WALL IS ONLY ONE MORE TRUMP HOAX! Only a
complete fool would believe that Trump is any more for American Legal workers
than the Democrat Party for Billionaires and Banksters!
“Trump
Administration Betrays Low-Skilled American Workers.”
The
latest ad from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) asks Trump
to reject the mass illegal and legal immigration policies supported by Wall
Street, corporate executives, and most specifically, the GOP mega-donor Koch
brothers.
*
Efforts by the big business
lobby, Chamber of Commerce, Koch brothers, and George W. Bush Center include
increasing employment-based legal immigration that would likely crush the historic wage gains that Trump has delivered
for America’s blue collar and working class citizens.
*
Mark
Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley investors are uniting with the Koch network’s
consumer and industrial investors to demand a huge DACA amnesty
*
A handful of
Republican and Democrat lawmakers are continuing to tout a plan that gives
amnesty to nearly a million illegal aliens in exchange for some amount of
funding for President Trump’s proposed border wall along the U.S.-Mexico
border.
MEXICO’S
INVASION by invitation!
"The
amnesty activist also said that the “border has been a crooked proposition from
the beginning, and it will continue to be twisted to meet political ends,”
adding that many open-borders activists still insist that “people didn’t cross
the border, the border crossed them.”
*
“At
some point we will have to accept the fact that the border between Mexico and
the United States is nothing more than an invention. It was demarcated in 1848,
following a war that cost Mexico about half its territory (it’s no coincidence
that cities like Los Angeles, San Antonio and San Francisco have Spanish
names),” Ramos said. “Also, it’s been said a thousand times that many people
didn’t cross the border, the border crossed them. And the cultural and
commercial ties between the two sides remain in place to this day. Look at the
fellowship exhibited by cities like El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico
even if barbed wire and concrete barriers have been erected in some places
along the divide.” LA RAZA SUPREMACIST JORGE RAMOS
*
1. What nation occupied the land for 300 years
on which Mexicans now live?
2. What nation purchased 525,000 sq. miles of that land from Mexico for $15
million dollars?
3. What nation has a tougher immigration policy than the one who bought the
land?
4. What nation built a wall along its Southern border to keep out illegal
aliens?
5. What nation has millions of Mexican and Central American immigrants who came
here legally and who don't want any illegal immigrants invading their country,
stealing their jobs and bringing gangs, crime, drugs, infectious disease and human
trafficking along with them?
6. What nation has millions of legal Latino immigrants who are proud to be
citizens of a host country that is a sovereign nation with defined borders and
with more individual freedoms and economic opportunities than any place on
earth?
7. What people would like to tell the race-baiting, Jose Ramos, "Vete a la
mierda!"?
ANSWERS:
1. Spain
2. United States
3. Mexico
4. Mexico
5. United States
6. United States
7. Latino Americans and other Americans who are not liberal Democrats.
FROSTY WOOLDRIGE
DOUBLING AMERICA’S POPULATION: A tragedy in the making!
*
*
Do you want your children to face the ominous ecological,
sociological and cultural clashes they will encounter with an added 50 million
legal immigrants? Do you want your kids to face 100 different languages in your
schools? In Denver, my city, we must contend with 173 different languages
in our classrooms. Do you want to pay ever-increasing amounts of your
taxes toward housing, feeding, medicating, educating and caring for 50 million
foreign-born immigrants who lack any qualifications, any cultural affinity,
and/or any educational abilities to contribute to our first world economy and
society?
*
If you think the future will be pretty for your kids, just look at
what’s happening in Detroit-istan, Minneapolis-istan, Miami-istan, Los
Angeles-Mexico or the murder capital of America—Chicago. If you think the
60,000 plus homeless living in tent cities in Los Angeles and 11,000 homeless
in San Francisco can’t be solved, how do you think we will solve millions of
immigrants from Africa, Indochina, India, Mexico and heaven knows where else in
the world?
2. What nation purchased 525,000 sq. miles of that land from Mexico for $15 million dollars?
3. What nation has a tougher immigration policy than the one who bought the land?
4. What nation built a wall along its Southern border to keep out illegal aliens?
5. What nation has millions of Mexican and Central American immigrants who came here legally and who don't want any illegal immigrants invading their country, stealing their jobs and bringing gangs, crime, drugs, infectious disease and human trafficking along with them?
6. What nation has millions of legal Latino immigrants who are proud to be citizens of a host country that is a sovereign nation with defined borders and with more individual freedoms and economic opportunities than any place on earth?
7. What people would like to tell the race-baiting, Jose Ramos, "Vete a la mierda!"?
2. United States
3. Mexico
4. Mexico
5. United States
6. United States
7. Latino Americans and other Americans who are not liberal Democrats.
No comments:
Post a Comment