The U.S. job machine's broken

[Manix]

New York Daily News
February 4, 2004


<snip>



The Bush administration has a big problem. Last year, the President and his aides promised that their tax cut would give America what it needed most: jobs. Never happened. Total job creation was supposed to average out at 306,000 a month, but not even a third of that has been achieved. The numbers clearly undercut the Bush claim that tax cuts for the wealthy would generate jobs for the middle and working classes.

The jobless recovery we're now in is unlike anything the American economy has ever seen. Typically, the Great American Job Machine energizes our economy. New jobs beget more income, which begets more spending, which begets more hiring, incomes and spending. What we're seeing now, however, suggests that there may be something fundamentally wrong in the engine room of the American economy.

In the recoveries of the mid-1970s and 1980s, America was generating about 300,000 new jobs a month within six months of cyclical upturns. In the early 1990s, this expansion slowed to about 200,000 a month, and we had to wait a full two years for that.

This time, we have seen not a deceleration in job creation, but a net loss - the sharpest in any period since the Great Depression, especially in manufacturing. No work and not much in the way of wage increases either. Ouch!



Full Text

[KissMyAsscroft]

1. The jobs are going overseas...

nt

[ozymandius]

2. Exactly.

When the Bush administration declared that job creation would blossom under their fiscal policies, I, unwittingly, thought they meant jobs would be created here - inside our nation's borders.

[mars_clover]

5. Yup!

The jobs are going overseas, and the resulting drop in production cost is resulting in increased profits. Thus the numbers look good, "productivity" looks good, but no jobs - a "jobless recovery".

My only hope is that eventually, when no one can afford TVs anymore at today's prices (and profit margins), the price of TVs will drop to $5 a unit or so to reflect the actual labor cost to produce them and a realistic profit margin.

If every retail good cost 75% of its current price to buy, you might actually get by being a pizza delivery boy. 'Course, I'm not sure my mortgage company is going to cut my mortage by 75% anytime over the next 30 years...

Clover

[kalian]

3. They;ve outsourced manufacturing and "knowledge" workers....

what's left after "knowledge"...? :shrug:

[Fovea]

4. What's left?

The Draft.

[indepat]

6. Don't worry: many will likely be needed to fill draft quotas, especially

if we run multiple wars/occupations simultaneously.