The Long Road Ahead
SINCE LAST SPRING, when fears of economic apocalypse began to ebb, we’ve been treated to an alphabet soup of predictions about the recovery. Various economists have suggested that it might look like a V (a strong and rapid rebound), a U (slower), a W (reflecting the possibility of a double-dip recession), or, most alarming, an L (no recovery in demand or jobs for years: a lost decade). This summer, with all the good letters already taken, the former labor secretary Robert Reich wrote on his blog that the recovery might actually be shaped like an X (the imagery is elusive, but Reich’s argument was that there can be no recovery until we find an entirely new model of economic growth).
No one knows what shape the recovery will take. The economy grew at an annual rate of 2.2 percent in the third quarter of last year, the first increase since the second quarter of 2008. If economic growth continues to pick up, substantial job growth will eventually follow. But there are many reasons to doubt the durability of the economic turnaround, and the speed with which jobs will return.
Historically, financial crises have spawned long periods of economic malaise, and this crisis, so far, has been true to form. Despite the bailouts, many banks’ balance sheets remain weak; more than 140 banks failed in 2009. As a result, banks have kept lending standards tight, frustrating the efforts of small businesses—which have accounted for almost half of all job losses—to invest or rehire. Exports seem unlikely to provide much of a boost; although China, India, Brazil, and some other emerging markets are growing quickly again, Europe and Japan—both major markets for U.S. exports—remain weak. And in any case, exports make up only about 13 percent of total U.S. production; even if they were to grow quickly, the impact would be muted.
Most recessions end when people start spending again, but for the foreseeable future, U.S. consumer demand is unlikely to propel strong economic growth. As of November, one in seven mortgages was delinquent, up from one in 10 a year earlier. As many as one in four houses may now be underwater, and the ratio of household debt to GDP, about 65 percent in the mid-1990s, is roughly 100 percent today. It is not merely animal spirits that are keeping people from spending freely (though those spirits are dour). Heavy debt and large losses of wealth have forced spending onto a lower path.
So what is the engine that will pull the U.S. back onto a strong growth path? That turns out to be a hard question. The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who fears a lost decade, said in a lecture at the London School of Economics last summer that he has “no idea” how the economy could quickly return to strong, sustainable growth. Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, told the Associated Press last fall, “I think the unemployment rate will be permanently higher, or at least higher for the foreseeable future. The collective psyche has changed as a result of what we’ve been through. And we’re going to be different as a result.”
One big reason that the economy stabilized last summer and fall is the stimulus; the Congressional Budget Office estimates that without the stimulus, growth would have been anywhere from 1.2 to 3.2 percentage points lower in the third quarter of 2009. The stimulus will continue to trickle into the economy for the next couple of years, but as a concentrated force, it’s largely spent. Christina Romer, the chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said last fall, “By mid-2010, fiscal stimulus will likely be contributing little to further growth,” adding that she didn’t expect unemployment to fall significantly until 2011. That prediction has since been echoed, more or less, by the Federal Reserve and Goldman Sachs.
The economy now sits in a hole more than 10 million jobs deep—that’s the number required to get back to 5 percent unemployment, the rate we had before the recession started, and one that’s been more or less typical for a generation. And because the population is growing and new people are continually coming onto the job market, we need to produce roughly 1.5 million new jobs a year—about 125,000 a month—just to keep from sinking deeper.
Even if the economy were to immediately begin producing 600,000 jobs a month—more than double the pace of the mid-to-late 1990s, when job growth was strong—it would take roughly two years to dig ourselves out of the hole we’re in. The economy could add jobs that fast, or even faster—job growth is theoretically limited only by labor supply, and a lot more labor is sitting idle today than usual. But the U.S. hasn’t seen that pace of sustained employment growth in more than 30 years. And given the particulars of this recession, matching idle workers with new jobs—even once economic growth picks up—seems likely to be a particularly slow and challenging process.
The construction and finance industries, bloated by a decade-long housing bubble, are unlikely to regain their former share of the economy, and as a result many out-of-work finance professionals and construction workers won’t be able to simply pick up where they left off when growth returns—they’ll need to retrain and find new careers. (For different reasons, the same might be said of many media professionals and auto workers.) And even within industries that are likely to bounce back smartly, temporary layoffs have generally given way to the permanent elimination of jobs, the result of workplace restructuring. Manufacturing jobs have of course been moving overseas for decades, and still are; but recently, the outsourcing of much white-collar work has become possible. Companies that have cut domestic payrolls to the bone in this recession may choose to rebuild them in Shanghai, Guangzhou, or Bangalore, accelerating off-shoring decisions that otherwise might have occurred over many years.
New jobs will come open in the U.S. But many will have different skill requirements than the old ones. “In a sense,” says Gary Burtless, a labor economist at the Brookings Institution, “every time someone’s laid off now, they need to start all over. They don’t even know what industry they’ll be in next.” And as a spell of unemployment lengthens, skills erode and behavior tends to change, leaving some people unqualified even for work they once did well.
Ultimately, innovation is what allows an economy to grow quickly and create new jobs as old ones obsolesce and disappear. Typically, one salutary side effect of recessions is that they eventually spur booms in innovation. Some laid-off employees become entrepreneurs, working on ideas that have been ignored by corporate bureaucracies, while sclerotic firms in declining industries fail, making way for nimbler enterprises. But according to the economist Edmund Phelps, the innovative potential of the U.S. economy looks limited today. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, he and his co-author, Leo Tilman, argue that dynamism in the U.S. has actually been in decline for a decade; with the housing bubble fueling easy (but unsustainable) growth for much of that time, we just didn’t notice. Phelps and Tilman finger several culprits: a patent system that’s become stifling; an increasingly myopic focus among public companies on quarterly results, rather than long-term value creation; and, not least, a financial industry that for a generation has focused its talent and resources not on funding business innovation, but on proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, and arcane financial engineering. None of these problems is likely to disappear quickly. Phelps, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on the “natural” rate of unemployment, believes that until they do disappear, the new floor for unemployment is likely to be between 6.5 percent and 7.5 percent, even once “recovery” is complete.
It’s likely, then, that for the next several years or more, the jobs environment will more closely resemble today’s environment than that of 2006 or 2007—or for that matter, the environment to which we were accustomed for a generation. Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, notes that if the recovery follows the same basic path as the last two (in 1991 and 2001), unemployment will stand at roughly 8 percent in 2014.
“We haven’t seen anything like this before: a really deep recession combined with a really extended period, maybe as much as eight years, all told, of highly elevated unemployment,” Shierholz told me. “We’re about to see a big national experiment on stress.”
********news update********Spains unemployment is at 20%, probably higher. It is only a matter of time before Spain hits their debt crisis and will need a bailout just like Greece.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Monday, April 26, 2010
The negative effects of unemployment
Because I have not learned how to link here (but I am still trying), I had to copy and paste a very insightful article written for The Atlantic on the effects of unemployment. This is the first installment of the long article so I will post bit by bit for a more thought provoking result.
How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
THE GREAT RECESSION MAY BE OVER, BUT THIS ERA OF HIGH JOBLESSNESS IS PROBABLY JUST BEGINNING. BEFORE IT ENDS, IT WILL LIKELY CHANGE THE LIFE COURSE AND CHARACTER OF A GENERATION OF YOUNG ADULTS. IT WILL LEAVE AN INDELIBLE IMPRINT ON MANY BLUE-COLLAR MEN. IT COULD CRIPPLE MARRIAGE AS AN INSTITUTION IN MANY COMMUNITIES. IT MAY ALREADY BE PLUNGING MANY INNER CITIES INTO A DESPAIR NOT SEEN FOR DECADES. ULTIMATELY, IT IS LIKELY TO WARP OUR POLITICS, OUR CULTURE, AND THE CHARACTER OF OUR SOCIETY FOR YEARS TO COME.
By Don Peck
HOW SHOULD WE characterize the economic period we have now entered? After nearly two brutal years, the Great Recession appears to be over, at least technically. Yet a return to normalcy seems far off. By some measures, each recession since the 1980s has retreated more slowly than the one before it. In one sense, we never fully recovered from the last one, in 2001: the share of the civilian population with a job never returned to its previous peak before this downturn began, and incomes were stagnant throughout the decade. Still, the weakness that lingered through much of the 2000s shouldn’t be confused with the trauma of the past two years, a trauma that will remain heavy for quite some time.
The unemployment rate hit 10 percent in October, and there are good reasons to believe that by 2011, 2012, even 2014, it will have declined only a little. Late last year, the average duration of unemployment surpassed six months, the first time that has happened since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking that number. As of this writing, for every open job in the U.S., six people are actively looking for work.
All of these figures understate the magnitude of the jobs crisis. The broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment (which includes people who want to work but have stopped actively searching for a job, along with those who want full-time jobs but can find only part-time work) reached 17.4 percent in October, which appears to be the highest figure since the 1930s. And for large swaths of society—young adults, men, minorities—that figure was much higher (among teenagers, for instance, even the narrowest measure of unemployment stood at roughly 27 percent). One recent survey showed that 44 percent of families had experienced a job loss, a reduction in hours, or a pay cut in the past year.
There is unemployment, a brief and relatively routine transitional state that results from the rise and fall of companies in any economy, and there is unemployment—chronic, all-consuming. The former is a necessary lubricant in any engine of economic growth. The latter is a pestilence that slowly eats away at people, families, and, if it spreads widely enough, the fabric of society. Indeed, history suggests that it is perhaps society’s most noxious ill.
The worst effects of pervasive joblessness—on family, politics, society—take time to incubate, and they show themselves only slowly. But ultimately, they leave deep marks that endure long after boom times have returned. Some of these marks are just now becoming visible, and even if the economy magically and fully recovers tomorrow, new ones will continue to appear. The longer our economic slump lasts, the deeper they’ll be.
If it persists much longer, this era of high joblessness will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults—and quite possibly those of the children behind them as well. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar white men—and on white culture. It could change the nature of modern marriage, and also cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a kind of despair and dysfunction not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years.
How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
THE GREAT RECESSION MAY BE OVER, BUT THIS ERA OF HIGH JOBLESSNESS IS PROBABLY JUST BEGINNING. BEFORE IT ENDS, IT WILL LIKELY CHANGE THE LIFE COURSE AND CHARACTER OF A GENERATION OF YOUNG ADULTS. IT WILL LEAVE AN INDELIBLE IMPRINT ON MANY BLUE-COLLAR MEN. IT COULD CRIPPLE MARRIAGE AS AN INSTITUTION IN MANY COMMUNITIES. IT MAY ALREADY BE PLUNGING MANY INNER CITIES INTO A DESPAIR NOT SEEN FOR DECADES. ULTIMATELY, IT IS LIKELY TO WARP OUR POLITICS, OUR CULTURE, AND THE CHARACTER OF OUR SOCIETY FOR YEARS TO COME.
By Don Peck
HOW SHOULD WE characterize the economic period we have now entered? After nearly two brutal years, the Great Recession appears to be over, at least technically. Yet a return to normalcy seems far off. By some measures, each recession since the 1980s has retreated more slowly than the one before it. In one sense, we never fully recovered from the last one, in 2001: the share of the civilian population with a job never returned to its previous peak before this downturn began, and incomes were stagnant throughout the decade. Still, the weakness that lingered through much of the 2000s shouldn’t be confused with the trauma of the past two years, a trauma that will remain heavy for quite some time.
The unemployment rate hit 10 percent in October, and there are good reasons to believe that by 2011, 2012, even 2014, it will have declined only a little. Late last year, the average duration of unemployment surpassed six months, the first time that has happened since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking that number. As of this writing, for every open job in the U.S., six people are actively looking for work.
All of these figures understate the magnitude of the jobs crisis. The broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment (which includes people who want to work but have stopped actively searching for a job, along with those who want full-time jobs but can find only part-time work) reached 17.4 percent in October, which appears to be the highest figure since the 1930s. And for large swaths of society—young adults, men, minorities—that figure was much higher (among teenagers, for instance, even the narrowest measure of unemployment stood at roughly 27 percent). One recent survey showed that 44 percent of families had experienced a job loss, a reduction in hours, or a pay cut in the past year.
There is unemployment, a brief and relatively routine transitional state that results from the rise and fall of companies in any economy, and there is unemployment—chronic, all-consuming. The former is a necessary lubricant in any engine of economic growth. The latter is a pestilence that slowly eats away at people, families, and, if it spreads widely enough, the fabric of society. Indeed, history suggests that it is perhaps society’s most noxious ill.
The worst effects of pervasive joblessness—on family, politics, society—take time to incubate, and they show themselves only slowly. But ultimately, they leave deep marks that endure long after boom times have returned. Some of these marks are just now becoming visible, and even if the economy magically and fully recovers tomorrow, new ones will continue to appear. The longer our economic slump lasts, the deeper they’ll be.
If it persists much longer, this era of high joblessness will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults—and quite possibly those of the children behind them as well. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar white men—and on white culture. It could change the nature of modern marriage, and also cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a kind of despair and dysfunction not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years.
Because I have not learned how to link here (but I am still trying), I had to copy and paste a very insightful article written
How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
THE GREAT RECESSION MAY BE OVER, BUT THIS ERA OF HIGH JOBLESSNESS IS PROBABLY JUST BEGINNING. BEFORE IT ENDS, IT WILL LIKELY CHANGE THE LIFE COURSE AND CHARACTER OF A GENERATION OF YOUNG ADULTS. IT WILL LEAVE AN INDELIBLE IMPRINT ON MANY BLUE-COLLAR MEN. IT COULD CRIPPLE MARRIAGE AS AN INSTITUTION IN MANY COMMUNITIES. IT MAY ALREADY BE PLUNGING MANY INNER CITIES INTO A DESPAIR NOT SEEN FOR DECADES. ULTIMATELY, IT IS LIKELY TO WARP OUR POLITICS, OUR CULTURE, AND THE CHARACTER OF OUR SOCIETY FOR YEARS TO COME.
By Don Peck
IMAGE CREDIT: FREDRIK BRODEN
HOW SHOULD WE characterize the economic period we have now entered? After nearly two brutal years, the Great Recession appears to be over, at least technically. Yet a return to normalcy seems far off. By some measures, each recession since the 1980s has retreated more slowly than the one before it. In one sense, we never fully recovered from the last one, in 2001: the share of the civilian population with a job never returned to its previous peak before this downturn began, and incomes were stagnant throughout the decade. Still, the weakness that lingered through much of the 2000s shouldn’t be confused with the trauma of the past two years, a trauma that will remain heavy for quite some time.
The unemployment rate hit 10 percent in October, and there are good reasons to believe that by 2011, 2012, even 2014, it will have declined only a little. Late last year, the average duration of unemployment surpassed six months, the first time that has happened since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking that number. As of this writing, for every open job in the U.S., six people are actively looking for work.
All of these figures understate the magnitude of the jobs crisis. The broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment (which includes people who want to work but have stopped actively searching for a job, along with those who want full-time jobs but can find only part-time work) reached 17.4 percent in October, which appears to be the highest figure since the 1930s. And for large swaths of society—young adults, men, minorities—that figure was much higher (among teenagers, for instance, even the narrowest measure of unemployment stood at roughly 27 percent). One recent survey showed that 44 percent of families had experienced a job loss, a reduction in hours, or a pay cut in the past year.
There is unemployment, a brief and relatively routine transitional state that results from the rise and fall of companies in any economy, and there is unemployment—chronic, all-consuming. The former is a necessary lubricant in any engine of economic growth. The latter is a pestilence that slowly eats away at people, families, and, if it spreads widely enough, the fabric of society. Indeed, history suggests that it is perhaps society’s most noxious ill.
The worst effects of pervasive joblessness—on family, politics, society—take time to incubate, and they show themselves only slowly. But ultimately, they leave deep marks that endure long after boom times have returned. Some of these marks are just now becoming visible, and even if the economy magically and fully recovers tomorrow, new ones will continue to appear. The longer our economic slump lasts, the deeper they’ll be.
If it persists much longer, this era of high joblessness will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults—and quite possibly those of the children behind them as well. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar white men—and on white culture. It could change the nature of modern marriage, and also cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a kind of despair and dysfunction not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years.
The Long Road Ahead
SINCE LAST SPRING, when fears of ec
How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
THE GREAT RECESSION MAY BE OVER, BUT THIS ERA OF HIGH JOBLESSNESS IS PROBABLY JUST BEGINNING. BEFORE IT ENDS, IT WILL LIKELY CHANGE THE LIFE COURSE AND CHARACTER OF A GENERATION OF YOUNG ADULTS. IT WILL LEAVE AN INDELIBLE IMPRINT ON MANY BLUE-COLLAR MEN. IT COULD CRIPPLE MARRIAGE AS AN INSTITUTION IN MANY COMMUNITIES. IT MAY ALREADY BE PLUNGING MANY INNER CITIES INTO A DESPAIR NOT SEEN FOR DECADES. ULTIMATELY, IT IS LIKELY TO WARP OUR POLITICS, OUR CULTURE, AND THE CHARACTER OF OUR SOCIETY FOR YEARS TO COME.
By Don Peck
IMAGE CREDIT: FREDRIK BRODEN
HOW SHOULD WE characterize the economic period we have now entered? After nearly two brutal years, the Great Recession appears to be over, at least technically. Yet a return to normalcy seems far off. By some measures, each recession since the 1980s has retreated more slowly than the one before it. In one sense, we never fully recovered from the last one, in 2001: the share of the civilian population with a job never returned to its previous peak before this downturn began, and incomes were stagnant throughout the decade. Still, the weakness that lingered through much of the 2000s shouldn’t be confused with the trauma of the past two years, a trauma that will remain heavy for quite some time.
The unemployment rate hit 10 percent in October, and there are good reasons to believe that by 2011, 2012, even 2014, it will have declined only a little. Late last year, the average duration of unemployment surpassed six months, the first time that has happened since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking that number. As of this writing, for every open job in the U.S., six people are actively looking for work.
All of these figures understate the magnitude of the jobs crisis. The broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment (which includes people who want to work but have stopped actively searching for a job, along with those who want full-time jobs but can find only part-time work) reached 17.4 percent in October, which appears to be the highest figure since the 1930s. And for large swaths of society—young adults, men, minorities—that figure was much higher (among teenagers, for instance, even the narrowest measure of unemployment stood at roughly 27 percent). One recent survey showed that 44 percent of families had experienced a job loss, a reduction in hours, or a pay cut in the past year.
There is unemployment, a brief and relatively routine transitional state that results from the rise and fall of companies in any economy, and there is unemployment—chronic, all-consuming. The former is a necessary lubricant in any engine of economic growth. The latter is a pestilence that slowly eats away at people, families, and, if it spreads widely enough, the fabric of society. Indeed, history suggests that it is perhaps society’s most noxious ill.
The worst effects of pervasive joblessness—on family, politics, society—take time to incubate, and they show themselves only slowly. But ultimately, they leave deep marks that endure long after boom times have returned. Some of these marks are just now becoming visible, and even if the economy magically and fully recovers tomorrow, new ones will continue to appear. The longer our economic slump lasts, the deeper they’ll be.
If it persists much longer, this era of high joblessness will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults—and quite possibly those of the children behind them as well. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar white men—and on white culture. It could change the nature of modern marriage, and also cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a kind of despair and dysfunction not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years.
The Long Road Ahead
SINCE LAST SPRING, when fears of ec
Unemployment is getting worse for those in low-income jobs
I have been a low-income earner for many years now but never has it been a burden than now. Not only am I unemployed, but when and if I ever do get a job, the income I earn is not nearly enough to provide sufficiently for me. This is why I have been struggling for years. I understand how hard it is to get by on $10 an hour. Even with overtime, by the time housing costs, transportation costs, food costs, dental costs, medical costs, utilities and phone have devoured your income, there is simply nothing left to save. More than likely something has to be negleted such as the dentist or the doctor. People making sufficiently more simply do not understand this and in fact have looked down upon those making less as if somehow it is their fault.
I admit that I am not the best money manager and yes I have spent money on things I do not need, but who has not. There is not a human being, especially in this consumer driven society that has not bought stuff they do not need. That does not negate the fact that inflation has gone through the roof because I remember vividly just as little as 15 years ago I actually did OK on my own. I was averaging $10 hour and paying my own way. I even payed down my $10,000 debt all on my own, probably because I had a better attitude about my future (now I realize my only hope is in Jesus Christ, not this earth because I have no future in this world but praise the Lord I most certainly have a better hope and future with Him). But even with a good attitude, I still honestly struggled but not nearly as I do now factoring in inflation. This is why it is so overwhelming trying to make it on your own as a low-income earner. People love to use the slogan........... pull yourselves up by your bootstraps.........but I will tell you that you can only do so much as you are taxed into oblivion and then what is left goes right out of your pocket for basis necessities of life. Just imagine when gas will go up to $7 a gallon and a VAT added as well as Obama healthcare. How can they expect people to have mandated healthcare when they do not even have a job. There is no doubt unemployment will stay steady if not rise in the coming years and there will be NO economic recovery no matter what the Harvard economists tell you. There are no more bubbles to inflate and they are left with nothing but extreme taxation which will only drive up unemployment. Truly it is basis mathematics.
You would THINK if Obama cared, he would address the most basis problem and that is unemployment, but why should he care when he gets his presidential treatment like private jets and lobster dinners! But frankly is it worth it anymore to work when you are taxed into oblivion or your company decides they do not like you so they stop paying you for hours you already worked..........that happened at my last brief encounter at a job I though I had. Obviously that was all satanic, no doubt!
I truly pity young people today. They have no future, no jobs and the only jobs that are left (which are not out-sourced) are low paying service jobs with no benefits or temp jobs with no benefits. Oh and lest I forget, everyone knows that at these low-paying service jobs you are treated like a slave and harassed and threatened and manipulated. You may as well be working in a communist country in a sweat factory as slave labor. A great book to read that addresses all of these problems is called GENERATION DEBT. I found it in a book store that was closing and selling all of its books for 75% off. I only payed 25 cents for it and it was one of the best books that I have read. I related to all the research in it. Ironically it is written by a young gal.....only 25 years old and she took the time to investigate much information and became her own journalist and reporter to write the book from real life people and real life situations, no bias..........certainly NOT what you hear elsewhere.
Read this article from the Washington blog dated today.........
Boeing CEO Jim McNerney succinctly summarized a recent study by Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies regarding unemployment rates for different income brackets:
The Center analyzed the labor conditions faced by income-grouped U.S. households during the fourth quarter of 2009.
In the face of one of the worst economic environments in memory, those in the highest income groups had nearly full employment levels, with just a 3.2 percent unemployment rate for households with over $150,000 in income and a 4 percent rate in the next-highest income group of $100,000-plus.
The two lowest-income groups — under $12,500 and under $20,000 annually — faced unemployment rates of 30.8 percent and 19.1 percent, respectively.
The study – published in February – notes that the poor are suffering Depression levels of unemployment:
Workers in the lowest income decile faced a Great Depression type unemployment rate of nearly 31% while those in the second lowest income decile had an unemployment rate slightly below 20% …. Unemployment rates fell steadily and steeply across the ten income deciles. Workers in the top two deciles of the income distribution faced unemployment rates of only 4.0 and 3.2 percent respectively, the equivalent of full employment. The relative size of the gap in unemployment rates between workers in the bottom and top income deciles was close to ten to one. Clearly, these two groups of workers occupy radically different types of labor markets in the U.S.
The study is subtitled “A Truly Great Depression Among the Nation’s Low Income Workers Amidst Full Employment Among the Most Affluent”.
Arianna Huffington, commenting on the study, pointed out that it if were the high-earners suffering 31 percent unemployment, the media would be discussing unemployment non-stop. But because it is the poor who are suffering Depression-level unemployment, they largely ignore it.
As I noted last August:
Chris Tilly – director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UCLA – points out that some populations, such as African-Americans and high school dropouts, have been hit much harder than other populations, and that these groups are already experiencing depression-level unemployment.
Get the book Generation Debt........by Anya Kamenetz
Letting Uncle Sam Foot the Bill
by Anya Kamenetz
3.0428576/5
Both my grandfathers served in World War II, and both went to school on the GI Bill. One became an accountant and the other a pharmacist.
It's a common experience: about 8 million Americans took advantage of GI Bill benefits between 1944 and 1956. Back then, the military provided full tuition, fees, books, and a stipend to returning soldiers.
Diminishing Returns
The considerable investment paid off in both human and economic terms. It's estimated that for every dollar spent on initial GI Bill benefits, six were returned to the Treasury due to increased earnings by members of the Greatest Generation.
Flash forward 55 years, and our nation is engaged in a conflict that's surpassed the amount of time we fought in the WWII. And according to the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a 2004 survey found that "money for college" was the No. 1 reason civilians gave for enlisting to fight in those countries.
But the current Montgomery GI Bill, passed in 1984, far from lives up to its predecessor. Higher costs, stingier benefits, and bureaucracy have put obstacles in the way of young vets attending college. Veterans' advocates are backing a new proposed law that would restore the promise of the GI Bill for all who serve.
I admit that I am not the best money manager and yes I have spent money on things I do not need, but who has not. There is not a human being, especially in this consumer driven society that has not bought stuff they do not need. That does not negate the fact that inflation has gone through the roof because I remember vividly just as little as 15 years ago I actually did OK on my own. I was averaging $10 hour and paying my own way. I even payed down my $10,000 debt all on my own, probably because I had a better attitude about my future (now I realize my only hope is in Jesus Christ, not this earth because I have no future in this world but praise the Lord I most certainly have a better hope and future with Him). But even with a good attitude, I still honestly struggled but not nearly as I do now factoring in inflation. This is why it is so overwhelming trying to make it on your own as a low-income earner. People love to use the slogan........... pull yourselves up by your bootstraps.........but I will tell you that you can only do so much as you are taxed into oblivion and then what is left goes right out of your pocket for basis necessities of life. Just imagine when gas will go up to $7 a gallon and a VAT added as well as Obama healthcare. How can they expect people to have mandated healthcare when they do not even have a job. There is no doubt unemployment will stay steady if not rise in the coming years and there will be NO economic recovery no matter what the Harvard economists tell you. There are no more bubbles to inflate and they are left with nothing but extreme taxation which will only drive up unemployment. Truly it is basis mathematics.
You would THINK if Obama cared, he would address the most basis problem and that is unemployment, but why should he care when he gets his presidential treatment like private jets and lobster dinners! But frankly is it worth it anymore to work when you are taxed into oblivion or your company decides they do not like you so they stop paying you for hours you already worked..........that happened at my last brief encounter at a job I though I had. Obviously that was all satanic, no doubt!
I truly pity young people today. They have no future, no jobs and the only jobs that are left (which are not out-sourced) are low paying service jobs with no benefits or temp jobs with no benefits. Oh and lest I forget, everyone knows that at these low-paying service jobs you are treated like a slave and harassed and threatened and manipulated. You may as well be working in a communist country in a sweat factory as slave labor. A great book to read that addresses all of these problems is called GENERATION DEBT. I found it in a book store that was closing and selling all of its books for 75% off. I only payed 25 cents for it and it was one of the best books that I have read. I related to all the research in it. Ironically it is written by a young gal.....only 25 years old and she took the time to investigate much information and became her own journalist and reporter to write the book from real life people and real life situations, no bias..........certainly NOT what you hear elsewhere.
Read this article from the Washington blog dated today.........
Boeing CEO Jim McNerney succinctly summarized a recent study by Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies regarding unemployment rates for different income brackets:
The Center analyzed the labor conditions faced by income-grouped U.S. households during the fourth quarter of 2009.
In the face of one of the worst economic environments in memory, those in the highest income groups had nearly full employment levels, with just a 3.2 percent unemployment rate for households with over $150,000 in income and a 4 percent rate in the next-highest income group of $100,000-plus.
The two lowest-income groups — under $12,500 and under $20,000 annually — faced unemployment rates of 30.8 percent and 19.1 percent, respectively.
The study – published in February – notes that the poor are suffering Depression levels of unemployment:
Workers in the lowest income decile faced a Great Depression type unemployment rate of nearly 31% while those in the second lowest income decile had an unemployment rate slightly below 20% …. Unemployment rates fell steadily and steeply across the ten income deciles. Workers in the top two deciles of the income distribution faced unemployment rates of only 4.0 and 3.2 percent respectively, the equivalent of full employment. The relative size of the gap in unemployment rates between workers in the bottom and top income deciles was close to ten to one. Clearly, these two groups of workers occupy radically different types of labor markets in the U.S.
The study is subtitled “A Truly Great Depression Among the Nation’s Low Income Workers Amidst Full Employment Among the Most Affluent”.
Arianna Huffington, commenting on the study, pointed out that it if were the high-earners suffering 31 percent unemployment, the media would be discussing unemployment non-stop. But because it is the poor who are suffering Depression-level unemployment, they largely ignore it.
As I noted last August:
Chris Tilly – director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UCLA – points out that some populations, such as African-Americans and high school dropouts, have been hit much harder than other populations, and that these groups are already experiencing depression-level unemployment.
Get the book Generation Debt........by Anya Kamenetz
Letting Uncle Sam Foot the Bill
by Anya Kamenetz
3.0428576/5
Both my grandfathers served in World War II, and both went to school on the GI Bill. One became an accountant and the other a pharmacist.
It's a common experience: about 8 million Americans took advantage of GI Bill benefits between 1944 and 1956. Back then, the military provided full tuition, fees, books, and a stipend to returning soldiers.
Diminishing Returns
The considerable investment paid off in both human and economic terms. It's estimated that for every dollar spent on initial GI Bill benefits, six were returned to the Treasury due to increased earnings by members of the Greatest Generation.
Flash forward 55 years, and our nation is engaged in a conflict that's surpassed the amount of time we fought in the WWII. And according to the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a 2004 survey found that "money for college" was the No. 1 reason civilians gave for enlisting to fight in those countries.
But the current Montgomery GI Bill, passed in 1984, far from lives up to its predecessor. Higher costs, stingier benefits, and bureaucracy have put obstacles in the way of young vets attending college. Veterans' advocates are backing a new proposed law that would restore the promise of the GI Bill for all who serve.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
An impoverished nation
The once mighty nation of America is slowly finding its demise. The opportunities once thought as the American Dream are no longer realized. This nation is in serious trouble and so are most of its ignorant citizens, although some are beginning to realize that wealth is being aggregated into fewer and fewer hands. The great leader, Abraham Lincoln said this almost 150 years ago and he must have been right because he was assassinated.
To pay for Obama care and more and more bailout packages with reform we taxpayers will obviously have to foot the bill while we were promised there would be no increase in taxes for the middle class. What a joke! What is the middle class anyway, for the disparities between the rich elite and the poor is widening even further. The elite are just stuffing more and more of our money into their GREEDY coffers and they are merciless in their pursuit of world domination.
This new VAT (value added tax) will increase our cost of living another 20%, as if we were not already struggling to keep pace with inflation. These so called intelligent economists and policy makers supposedly gage inflation by a CPI or consumer price index and they repeatedly assure us that the CPI has not increased much, but I will tell you that most Americans who are struggling to put food on their tables and pay for automobiles, housing costs, insurance costs, etc., etc. will tell you quite a different story.
Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard graduate, has been lobbying Congress for years on behalf of Middle Class families and she is met most of the time with rebuffs and mockery. Her cries go unheard as do so many at the expense of the Greedy elite who will stop at nothing to decimate the American people into oblivion. ELizabeths husband, Bruce Mann, who has written some excellent books understands her concerns for he stands beside her with the same convictions.
Adopting the standard VAT as in European nations will turn America into a third world country with most of its citizens in poverty.....which will be a most advantageous time to create a world constitution which world leaders have been crying for for years now. They will get their world leader also but he will bring such a remarkable genocidal destruction to this planet such the world has never known. Just take the time to study Russia and the peasants under Stalins regime and study Germany and the unsuspecting people under the Third Reich. In Europe, it has been one evil dictator after another and America is being seduced and influenced by European powers and the banking cartel.
Take the time to read this article about the VAT to be informed........
The global banking elite are preparing to assault Americans with two huge new tax increases as President Obama contradicts the assurances of White House aides and his own campaign trail promise by asserting that a VAT tax is still on the table, as the IMF outlines a new tax on financial transactions that is being hailed as a blow to the banks yet represents another stealth tax on the people.
“President Barack Obama suggested Wednesday that a new value-added tax on Americans is still on the table, seeming to show more openness to the idea than his aides have expressed in recent days,” reports the Associated Press.
Obama’s signal that he may embrace a European-style VAT tax follows former Fed chairman Paul Volcker’s call for a value-added tax. In response, the U.S. Senate passed a nonbinding “sense of the Senate” resolution labeling any such move, “a massive tax increase that will cripple families on fixed income and only further push back America’s economic recovery.”
Not happy with hitting Americans with a roughly 20% increase in living costs that a VAT tax would impose, Volcker also called for a carbon tax in the name of solving the widely discredited scam of man-made global warming, a new levy that is already being introduced at the state level.
Despite the fact that White House aides dismissed the prospect of a national sales tax only on Monday, Obama’s u-turn once again contradicts his pre-election promise that he would not raise taxes for American families earning under a quarter of a million dollars a year.
During a speech on the campaign trail, Obama promised, “No family making under $250,000 dollars a year will see any form of tax increase.”
However, the VAT tax is a flat rate levy that applies to everyone, and it will dramatically increase the cost of living for Americans already laboring under the greatest financial meltdown since 1929. As CNS News highlights, VAT is also labeled “consumption tax, because it applies to items at every stage of production. Such a tax would affect purchasers at all income levels.”
Obama’s failure to keep his promise that families would not “see any form of tax increase” has force him to lie in public addresses and claim that he only ever promised not to increase income tax on families earning under $250,000.
“And one thing we have not done is raise income taxes on families making less than $250,000,” Obama said on April 10. “That’s another promise we’ve kept.”
As CNS News’ Fred Lucas points out, in addition to any future VAT tax, “The $1-trillion health care overhaul bill contains at least 12 taxes and fees that will affect households earning less than $250,000.”
In our special report on tax increases contained in the Obamacare bill, we identified dozens of tax increases, most of which would apply to families making under $250,000 a year.
While the Obama regime plans to whack Americans with a whopping new VAT tax, international bankers are busy preparing their own financial assault by readying a new tax on all financial transactions, a tax that would inevitably be passed down to consumers but one which globalists and the corporate media are stealthily introducing under the illusion that its aim is to target large banks and financial institutions.
Publications like the London Guardian are hailing the new IMF “FAT tax” as a necessary move that will “rein in banks” by taxing their profits and bonuses. However, what they’re less keen to stress is that this new “FAT tax” will also be accompanied by a financial stability contribution (FSC), “Which should be paid by all financial institutions, not just banks, and used to bail out weak and failing firms.” (Emphasis mine).
In other words, every single financial institution, including local credit unions, mom and pop’s car showroom business, small local banks, local student loan unions, and any company that offers small loans, will be forced to pay another slice of whatever meager sum they have left after the VAT tax, the carbon tax and the myriad of new health care taxes, directly to the G20 and the IMF, who will then dole it out to their Goldman Sachs buddies or whichever other giant financial megalith that is suddenly in need of a bailout.
A tax on financial transactions, even if it is introduced in the name of pegging back banker bonuses, will inevitably be passed on to all consumers, not just the wealthy. This will mark the end of free bank accounts, you will be forced to pay a monthly tax simply to have a checking account, paying bills, cashing checks, paying employees, every financial transaction imaginable will be subject to this new tax because the big banks will merely pillage the consumer to cover the costs of the “FAT tax” being imposed on them by the IMF.
“Clearly what this appears to say is very wide ranging and covers much more of the financial services sector than the industry expected. Taxation is not without consequences and additional taxation is not without additional consequences,” said Angela Knight, chief executive of the British Bankers’ Association, clearly implying that the costs will be passed on to everyone.
As the Guardian reports separately, the IMF plan “Is ambivalent about how governments spend the billions in revenue it would raise.” In other words, this will be nothing more than another slush fund directed straight into the coffers of the IMF and World Bank to fund the global government now being set up to boss this new infrastructure.
Guardian writer Dan Roberts states that under the FAT tax, “Taxing bank profits and bonuses in a globally co-ordinated way potentially makes more sense than taxing transactions because it stands less chance of simply being passed straight onto customers,” while failing to acknowledge that the FAT tax will be accompanied by an FSC tax that will do precisely that.
It’s abundantly clear that the global elite and the international offshore banking cartels that control our national governments are preparing another round of looting, but God forbid should Americans be expected to do anything other than lie back and meekly accept the raping they are about to suffer.
Being angry about massive tax increases that our leaders promised us would never happen in the midst of a massive economic downturn is unacceptable according to the manufactured consensus being spewed by the establishment media and the authorities, who have labeled all dissent and opposition to tax hikes as extremism and even domestic terrorism.
According to hate groups like the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose material is used to train police and federal authorities in America on who to target, getting upset about the fresh onslaught of pillaging you are about to suffer as it is openly announced means you’re an extremist, a racist, and possibly even a terrorist who should be silenced.
To pay for Obama care and more and more bailout packages with reform we taxpayers will obviously have to foot the bill while we were promised there would be no increase in taxes for the middle class. What a joke! What is the middle class anyway, for the disparities between the rich elite and the poor is widening even further. The elite are just stuffing more and more of our money into their GREEDY coffers and they are merciless in their pursuit of world domination.
This new VAT (value added tax) will increase our cost of living another 20%, as if we were not already struggling to keep pace with inflation. These so called intelligent economists and policy makers supposedly gage inflation by a CPI or consumer price index and they repeatedly assure us that the CPI has not increased much, but I will tell you that most Americans who are struggling to put food on their tables and pay for automobiles, housing costs, insurance costs, etc., etc. will tell you quite a different story.
Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard graduate, has been lobbying Congress for years on behalf of Middle Class families and she is met most of the time with rebuffs and mockery. Her cries go unheard as do so many at the expense of the Greedy elite who will stop at nothing to decimate the American people into oblivion. ELizabeths husband, Bruce Mann, who has written some excellent books understands her concerns for he stands beside her with the same convictions.
Adopting the standard VAT as in European nations will turn America into a third world country with most of its citizens in poverty.....which will be a most advantageous time to create a world constitution which world leaders have been crying for for years now. They will get their world leader also but he will bring such a remarkable genocidal destruction to this planet such the world has never known. Just take the time to study Russia and the peasants under Stalins regime and study Germany and the unsuspecting people under the Third Reich. In Europe, it has been one evil dictator after another and America is being seduced and influenced by European powers and the banking cartel.
Take the time to read this article about the VAT to be informed........
The global banking elite are preparing to assault Americans with two huge new tax increases as President Obama contradicts the assurances of White House aides and his own campaign trail promise by asserting that a VAT tax is still on the table, as the IMF outlines a new tax on financial transactions that is being hailed as a blow to the banks yet represents another stealth tax on the people.
“President Barack Obama suggested Wednesday that a new value-added tax on Americans is still on the table, seeming to show more openness to the idea than his aides have expressed in recent days,” reports the Associated Press.
Obama’s signal that he may embrace a European-style VAT tax follows former Fed chairman Paul Volcker’s call for a value-added tax. In response, the U.S. Senate passed a nonbinding “sense of the Senate” resolution labeling any such move, “a massive tax increase that will cripple families on fixed income and only further push back America’s economic recovery.”
Not happy with hitting Americans with a roughly 20% increase in living costs that a VAT tax would impose, Volcker also called for a carbon tax in the name of solving the widely discredited scam of man-made global warming, a new levy that is already being introduced at the state level.
Despite the fact that White House aides dismissed the prospect of a national sales tax only on Monday, Obama’s u-turn once again contradicts his pre-election promise that he would not raise taxes for American families earning under a quarter of a million dollars a year.
During a speech on the campaign trail, Obama promised, “No family making under $250,000 dollars a year will see any form of tax increase.”
However, the VAT tax is a flat rate levy that applies to everyone, and it will dramatically increase the cost of living for Americans already laboring under the greatest financial meltdown since 1929. As CNS News highlights, VAT is also labeled “consumption tax, because it applies to items at every stage of production. Such a tax would affect purchasers at all income levels.”
Obama’s failure to keep his promise that families would not “see any form of tax increase” has force him to lie in public addresses and claim that he only ever promised not to increase income tax on families earning under $250,000.
“And one thing we have not done is raise income taxes on families making less than $250,000,” Obama said on April 10. “That’s another promise we’ve kept.”
As CNS News’ Fred Lucas points out, in addition to any future VAT tax, “The $1-trillion health care overhaul bill contains at least 12 taxes and fees that will affect households earning less than $250,000.”
In our special report on tax increases contained in the Obamacare bill, we identified dozens of tax increases, most of which would apply to families making under $250,000 a year.
While the Obama regime plans to whack Americans with a whopping new VAT tax, international bankers are busy preparing their own financial assault by readying a new tax on all financial transactions, a tax that would inevitably be passed down to consumers but one which globalists and the corporate media are stealthily introducing under the illusion that its aim is to target large banks and financial institutions.
Publications like the London Guardian are hailing the new IMF “FAT tax” as a necessary move that will “rein in banks” by taxing their profits and bonuses. However, what they’re less keen to stress is that this new “FAT tax” will also be accompanied by a financial stability contribution (FSC), “Which should be paid by all financial institutions, not just banks, and used to bail out weak and failing firms.” (Emphasis mine).
In other words, every single financial institution, including local credit unions, mom and pop’s car showroom business, small local banks, local student loan unions, and any company that offers small loans, will be forced to pay another slice of whatever meager sum they have left after the VAT tax, the carbon tax and the myriad of new health care taxes, directly to the G20 and the IMF, who will then dole it out to their Goldman Sachs buddies or whichever other giant financial megalith that is suddenly in need of a bailout.
A tax on financial transactions, even if it is introduced in the name of pegging back banker bonuses, will inevitably be passed on to all consumers, not just the wealthy. This will mark the end of free bank accounts, you will be forced to pay a monthly tax simply to have a checking account, paying bills, cashing checks, paying employees, every financial transaction imaginable will be subject to this new tax because the big banks will merely pillage the consumer to cover the costs of the “FAT tax” being imposed on them by the IMF.
“Clearly what this appears to say is very wide ranging and covers much more of the financial services sector than the industry expected. Taxation is not without consequences and additional taxation is not without additional consequences,” said Angela Knight, chief executive of the British Bankers’ Association, clearly implying that the costs will be passed on to everyone.
As the Guardian reports separately, the IMF plan “Is ambivalent about how governments spend the billions in revenue it would raise.” In other words, this will be nothing more than another slush fund directed straight into the coffers of the IMF and World Bank to fund the global government now being set up to boss this new infrastructure.
Guardian writer Dan Roberts states that under the FAT tax, “Taxing bank profits and bonuses in a globally co-ordinated way potentially makes more sense than taxing transactions because it stands less chance of simply being passed straight onto customers,” while failing to acknowledge that the FAT tax will be accompanied by an FSC tax that will do precisely that.
It’s abundantly clear that the global elite and the international offshore banking cartels that control our national governments are preparing another round of looting, but God forbid should Americans be expected to do anything other than lie back and meekly accept the raping they are about to suffer.
Being angry about massive tax increases that our leaders promised us would never happen in the midst of a massive economic downturn is unacceptable according to the manufactured consensus being spewed by the establishment media and the authorities, who have labeled all dissent and opposition to tax hikes as extremism and even domestic terrorism.
According to hate groups like the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose material is used to train police and federal authorities in America on who to target, getting upset about the fresh onslaught of pillaging you are about to suffer as it is openly announced means you’re an extremist, a racist, and possibly even a terrorist who should be silenced.
Monday, April 12, 2010
The Perfect Storm is brewing
Our national debt is now @ 63% to our gross domestic product. In only a few short years that figure will change to 90% relative to GDP. Greece was just bailed out by the bankers so the bankers own Greece and many other European nations as well. They will stop at nothing to gain total control over everyone......aka.....new world order. Nazi police state. Soon it will come to the mark of the beast. No one will be allowed to buy or sell or eat without that mark. You will be forced to worship the beast if you want to eat or you will be denied life.
I find it rather interesting that the plane crash of Polands president and highest ranking military leaders was passed along in the news as fog and bad weather, but in this evil world there is no doubt in my mind that something much more sinister happened. Polands president may have refused to submit to the private ELITE plans for continued world domination, so they knocked him off. He was an impediment to their progress.
One more liberal judge will be appointed to the Supreme court so it is only a matter of time before they legalize sodomy and we will then witness Gods wrath in Romans 1. More and more earthquakes will come.
This country;s leadership is beginning to turn against Israel and will bring many with them and the politically correct atmosphere is waging a massive war on conscience and conviction infiltrating churches, schools, workplaces, and government. People are afraid to stand up for the truth.
Take the time to read this article and many more. Be informed.
http://www.midnightcall.com/articles/messages/863.html
COME QUICKLY LORD JESUS, COME QUICKLY. I LONG FOR YOUR RETURN SO THAT YOU CAN ESTABLISH YOUR RIGHTEOUSNESS AND JUSTICE ON THIS EARTH.
I find it rather interesting that the plane crash of Polands president and highest ranking military leaders was passed along in the news as fog and bad weather, but in this evil world there is no doubt in my mind that something much more sinister happened. Polands president may have refused to submit to the private ELITE plans for continued world domination, so they knocked him off. He was an impediment to their progress.
One more liberal judge will be appointed to the Supreme court so it is only a matter of time before they legalize sodomy and we will then witness Gods wrath in Romans 1. More and more earthquakes will come.
This country;s leadership is beginning to turn against Israel and will bring many with them and the politically correct atmosphere is waging a massive war on conscience and conviction infiltrating churches, schools, workplaces, and government. People are afraid to stand up for the truth.
Take the time to read this article and many more. Be informed.
http://www.midnightcall.com/articles/messages/863.html
COME QUICKLY LORD JESUS, COME QUICKLY. I LONG FOR YOUR RETURN SO THAT YOU CAN ESTABLISH YOUR RIGHTEOUSNESS AND JUSTICE ON THIS EARTH.
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