The Job Bomb

Written By : John Hawkins

The job market in our country is shockingly grim and getting worse:

Think the worst is over? Wrong. Conditions in the U.S. labor markets are awful and worsening. While the official unemployment rate is already 10.2% and another 200,000 jobs were lost in October, when you include discouraged workers and partially employed workers the figure is a whopping 17.5%.

While losing 200,000 jobs per month is better than the 700,000 jobs lost in January, current job losses still average more than the per month rate of 150,000 during the last recession.

Also, remember: The last recession ended in November 2001, but job losses continued for more than a year and half until June of 2003; ditto for the 1990-91 recession.

So we can expect that job losses will continue until the end of 2010 at the earliest. In other words, if you are unemployed and looking for work and just waiting for the economy to turn the corner, you had better hunker down. All the economic numbers suggest this will take a while. The jobs just are not coming back.

…The long-term picture for workers and families is even worse than current job loss numbers alone would suggest. Now as a way of sharing the pain, many firms are telling their workers to cut hours, take furloughs and accept lower wages. Specifically, that fall in hours worked is equivalent to another 3 million full time jobs lost on top of the 7.5 million jobs formally lost.

This is very bad news but we must face facts. Many of the lost jobs are gone forever, including construction jobs, finance jobs and manufacturing jobs. Recent studies suggest that a quarter of U.S. jobs are fully out-sourceable over time to other countries.

Many people, including the author of that article, Nouriel Roubini, suggest another stimulus package as a solution to the job problems. Unfortunately, history has proven time and time again that they don’t work. Heck, we just did a stimulus package that cost over a trillion dollars, including interest, and it was sold as a way to create jobs. Guess what? Despite the almost unfathomable cost, it failed utterly and completely to pump up the job market.

So, what can we do?

For starters: Tax cuts on business would be a good idea. Businesses can’t hire new people until they have money in their pockets. Foregoing government run health care, cap and trade, and promises of tax increases that are panicking Americans and causing them to hold off on spending money would be another plus. Another area where both parties typically fail at would be working to open up more overseas markets for American goods. Getting cheap goods from foreign sources stretches the value of a dollar and thus, is a good thing. But, our politicians do a terrible job of demanding that foreign countries lift tariffs and taxes on American goods, so that we can sell our products elsewhere. The more goods we ship overseas, the more jobs that will be produced at home.

This problem wasn’t created overnight and it can’t be fixed overnight, but there are things that can be done to help get the job market going back in the right direction.

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Mike_M

There’s one answer to the recession. It’s foolproof and has a 100% success rate. What is it? Productive work.

Our government is engaged in the business of punishing the productive in this country and now we’re reaping the rewards. “Tax the rich! Tax the rich!” scream the liberals. Ok, the rich have stopped hiring people. Now what?

“Stimulus! Stimulus!” cry the hopeless liberals. Ok. Cha-ching. Money gone, no net change in productive work. One trillion dollars in new debt.

The decision making ability of the market is the engine of the economy and taxes are the brakes. Right now the engine is in neutral because people have no idea what the government is going to do next, and the brakes are being slammed on with tax upon tax.

The solution? Immediately drop the Obamacare and Cap and Tax bills. Repeal the unspent stimulus money. Take as much TARP money as possible out of the money supply. Make the Bush tax cuts permanent and cut business taxes. Have Congress declare America open for business again and commit to do nothing from an economic legislative perspective for six months. The economy would take off like a rocket because it would be a friendly environment for people to expand businesses and hire.

The only question left now is whether the Democrat’s paralyzation of the economy is through ignorance and incompetence or by design.
BIG

How can private businesses even think about hiring new employees when they don’t have a clue as to how much these new employees are going to cost them? They don’t know what the healthcare is going to cost, if FICA caps are going to be removed, or what new fees and taxes they are going to be hit with. The only place that new jobs are going to be created in the coming year is in the government.
http://arcadehomer.blogspot.com celebrim

Almost no one is going to do alot of hiring in an political situation in this much turmoil.

“Change!” is not a mantra business owners like to hear.

Look this is the truth of the matter:

1) In 2008, I was working as a contractor in a major power supply and distribution company. I was told by the owner of the small business firm I worked for that if Obama won the election she’d have to lay off most of their employees. Guess what, she had to lay off most of their employees.
2) Obama gave a little noted speech about how he was going to shut down ‘coal power’ in the country and drive it out of business. It was little noted in America, but it was recieved by the employees in that power company as a declaration of war. They recieved it as a major political figure threatening their livelihoods and hense their families. The day after he one, the cubicle of employees – college educated white collar employees – next to mine went out and all bought assualt rifles. A couple weeks latter the company had laid off a couple hundred workers.
3) We haven’t even nearly hit bottom. We could easily see unemployment hit 18%, and real unemployment be near 30%. Smoke and mirrors aside, the economy is still tanking in most of the country, particularly the blue states. Oregon, California, New York, Illinois, and Michigan (and possibly Florida) aren’t even close to finished with the pain, and to be frank unless there is real change in the country – not those faux political promises – its hard to see employment in those states stabilizing in the next 10 years. The bottom is going to fall out of the dollar. That’s no longer fear mongering. It’s envitable. Nobody can say at this point that the dollar is ‘too big to fail’. Obama is running up a deficit that moves us from going bankrupt in 20-40 years, to going bankrupt before the end of his first term. He’s running monthly deficits equivalent to the out of control yearly defecits of not that long ago and he’s barely scratched his proposed spending initiatives what with cap and trade, health care, another corporate bailout, and Stimulus III still in the works. Inflation in the United States could top 20% annually once the bottom drops out on US global credit. Much like Hoover and FDR before them, between Bush opening the doors Obama’s massive meddling we’ve taken a relatively small problem and turned it into a generational crisis.
4) When Obama took office I said: “I hope he does a real good job, because America can’t afford anything else and it would be disasterous for the first black American president to be a disaster.” And honestly, at the time, I had some sincere hope that he wasn’t a complete idiot. Not so much that I voted for him, but sufficient that I didn’t think him worse than the idiot I did vote for (my wife impressed me by having the guys to vote for neither). Well, I was wrong. Obama is already in the top 5 worst American presidents, and he’s managing to make Jimmy Carter and GWB look like swell thoughtful guys.
http://networdblog.blogspot.com/ Christopher_Taylor

Unemployment is almost 12% in Oregon. Its going to get worse, then flatten off, because pretty much all the jobs that can be lost will be lost.

Until inflation hits.
Mike_M

“And honestly, at the time, I had some sincere hope that he wasn’t a complete idiot.”

I figured he’d be Bill Clinton II. Take a spin at liberalism then move toward the middle after his first attempt went bust. Instead he seems hell bent on his socialist policies even as the country collapses around him and the public is solidly in opposition.

He won’t have a choice next year. The Dems are going to get run off the table at every level of government, and delayed Porkulus or not, it’s going to revolve around two things: the expiring Bush tax cuts and the looming state budget disaster.

NY and CA aren’t going to be able to stop the bleeding through next year and are going to be looking at fiscal armageddon next summer or earlier. Obama’s policies will not change any of it.
Toastrider

Dunno if there’s any veracity to this, but I had heard on the radio there’s some very serious questions being raised now about the stimulus and where the money is going.

As in, stimulus dollars going to congressional districts that don’t exist.

Anyone got data on this?
http://networdblog.blogspot.com/ Christopher_Taylor

Obama’s policies will not change any of it.

There could be some that make matters worse…

As in, stimulus dollars going to congressional districts that don’t exist.

ABC recently reported that some of the “saved or created jobs” that the Obama administration has been lying about were in nonexistent congressional districts. They make an extremely optimistic estimate that 20% of these alleged jobs were fake. I think 20% is a generous estimate for how many are real.
tblrk2006

Anyone got data on this?
Posted by Toastrider
2009-11-17 19:13:43

Yup…its happened in a number of states already…including mine. Missouri. Another interesting tidbit is the bailout money that want to AIG. Little Timmy doesn’t know who all the interested parties are that got a chunk of the AIG money. We know now. Major contributors to obama. They had to get paid to vote for that crook.
Mike_M

“Anyone got data on this?”

It’s already coming out. This is going to make Watergate look like a littering citation.

Obama will be lucky to make it to 2012. Timmy is headed to Federal prison.
http://conservativebootcamp.com martinhale

You can expect to hear more reports like this because remember, Porkulus was structured in such a way that the spending doesn’t really get rolling until into 2010. There will be lots more reports of money going to fund projects which don’t help produce jobs and which serve to highlight the worst aspects of our legislative process.

Debbie Spend-it-now is selling America’s future to the Chinese

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