The US will still face high unemployment in 2020 except in “the most optimistic scenario for job creation”, according to a new report to be published on Friday.
America needs to create 21m new jobs to keep up with population growth, say analysts at the research arm of consultancy McKinsey, but that will only happen if the economic trends of the last decade are reversed.
[i]America needs to create 21m new jobs [/i]
I wonder if we have ever done that before??? Oh yes, back in the 1980’s after the disastorous Nixon/Carter economic policies. It was called [b]CONSERVATISM[/b]!
I refuse to pay for the rest of the story, however if this is correct???
“STICK A FORK IN US AND TURN US OVER – WE ARE SO DONE”!
If we have to endur over a decade of high unemployment of multiple millions of people, this will end up worse than the 1930’s depression and probably tear this nation apart. Job riots, food riots, housing riots and that’s on good days. Millions starving (not that we can’t stand to lose a few pounds) We may even see the breakup of the U.S. into militarized sectors to keep order. I am not looking forward to this.
Something new has to manifest a new style industrial revolution to get people back to work with livable wages and benefits. Don’t know what it will be but something has to arise.
Not sure where Capt. Deacon Warren gets his numbers. The only President to preside over the creation of that many jobs was Bill Clinton, during his administration, the US created 22.7 million jobs. Otherwise the closest we have come was:
Kennedy/Johnson – 15.8 million jobs over 8 years.
Jimmy Carter – 10.3 million jobs over 4 years.
Ronald Reagan – 16.1 million jobs over 8 years.
Actually Nixon was not a bad job creator either. Over 8 years he and Ford created 11.3 Million Jobs.
The worst job creator in history was of course Herbert Hoover, who was the only President to actually lose jobs over his tenure, at least since we began creating records. He was followed by Bush II and Bush I.
Of course these are total job creations, and the larger the population the easier it is to create more jobs. The largest percentage job increase in history was under FDR. During his administration the number of jobs in the country increased by 13.1%.
Clinton came in a distant second place by that measure.
#2 MatthewM:
You forgot about cannibalism, which will be both a symptom, and our solution.
The key issue here is that we (America) have long term structural employment problems. Most of those in positions of leadership are either unaware of this, or are failing to address these issues. If i hear another short term band aid proposed I feel as if I am going to scream….
Also, administrations get credit for the economy or blame but the creation of jobs comes from many sources, and much of the blame and or credit should lie elsewhere.
RE: ” The largest percentage job increase in history was under FDR. During his administration the number of jobs in the country increased by 13.1%.”
Yeh, government-made-up work that does stuff that the market isn’t interested in but that the State spends our tax dollars on is just “da bomb” . . .
It’s like proudly saying “The largest percentage dollar increase in circulation and the highest inflation was under XYZ’s administration.”
#3, I didn’t quote any numbers for Reagan. I quoted the target number from the story and then indirectly cited the policies of Reagan which led to powerful real job creation with higher real wages. I know the BLS numbers credit Clinton with higher absolute numbers than Reagan, but let’s apply some intellectual effort to the story instead of just vomiting statistics from a web page:
1. Reagan had to restart a stagflated economy after Carter/Nixon.
2. The momentum of Reagan job creation lasted well into the Clinton years
3. Clinton was blessed with a Republican congress that prevented him from following disastorous liberal policies
4. Clinton presided over the dot.com bubble build which ginned up his numbers
So again, the story says we need 21m new jobs. The policies that will get us there are free market, capitalism, limited government, low taxes, balanced budget policies; in other words, [b]CONSERVATIVE[/b] policies.
And this is not just a liberal vs conservative debate. This is about real people who are really hurting. It took 2 years of hard fiscal medicine under Reagan to break the stagflation gridlock of the late 1970’s. It may be a harder slog this time and it is going to take a magnanamous leader, not a politician, to put this country on the right track.
7, in fairness we were dealing with the “guns and butter” financing of the Vietnam war under Kennedy and Johnson. These things overlap and they are not necessarily one President’s fault.
#8, leaders take what comes their way and they either lead successfully or they don’t. What they shouldn’t do is make excuses, nor should we for them. Nixon’s wage-price control policies were a disaster, he reacted badly to what he inherited. Carter let the oil shock draw money out of the economy and made no effort fiscally to let people keep more of their money to compensate. So we got stagflation. Now we have a president who has exploded spending but not in a way that is remotely stimulative, has exploded the size of government, threatens tax increases, has enacted tax increases via Obamacare, and is pursuing socialist policies that has private industry holding on to cash until they can get some idea of what is coming down the pike and how much a new employee is really going to cost them. And we have a whole MSM that still defends this president and makes all the excuses they can think of to explain away the economic disaster we are living in.
The classic presidential excuse is “why things are so much worse than I ever thought they were”. I don’t buy that for one second.
I simply don’t understand where conservative confidence a la Deacon Warren comes from. The ultra-conservative polices of Harding and Coolidge presided over the Roaring Twenties but also led to the Great Depression. No, FDR’s policies did not bring us out of the latter (and that is something liberals should consider), but it is hard to deny that massive government spending on World War II coupled with postwar spending initiatives like the GI Bill did. Likewise the dotcom boom would not have been possible without government investment in the creation of the internet, but that was primarily a military effort (there’s a mix of conservative and liberal principles for you).
Our current situation seems rooted in both sides of things, liberal insistence on home ownership for the poor and conservative deregulation of the financial system. Sure Obama is increasing the deficit, but so did Bush’s tax cuts and didn’t that make the economy roar. I don’t know what the solution is, and nothing the President or Congress is offering is very inspiring. But I just don’t understand the rigid self-confidence that conservatives have that an unregulated market will solve everything when just such has been a real mixed bag in the past. Neither ideological extreme seems to be based on anything like facts. And yet the President and Congress stymieing each other is getting us nowhere. Maybe I’m missing something, and maybe I’m a wishy-washy moderate, but I think we all need to get off our ideological high horses (liberals included).
I’d also point out that a great part of what is going on right now is due to globalization. When you’ve got millions of Chinese and Indian peasants entering the global industrial workforce, that’s bound to create problems. Protectionism has never been particularly effective, but globalization really has changed the playing field and we are all struggling to catch up.
[i]I simply don’t understand where conservative confidence a la Deacon Warren comes from[/i]
No, I imagine you don’t.
Okay, so where? A conservative upbringing? A creative interpretation of history? Did Moroni bring you Milton Friedman on golden plates? Where?
re 7: It would be more accurate to say that the political need to oppose Clinton forced the Republican congress to actually follow through on the conservative policies to which they had hitherto merely paid lip service. Left to their own devices they were “liberal” with government spending.
#12, read the history of the founding of this country, the Federalist Papers for example, and then the history of free markets and robust capitalism, which with a rugged individualism created the greatest economy the world has ever known. Where ever socialism, marxism, or dictatorships have been tried, they fail. And along with their failures millions die and millions upon millions more are made miserable.
Not a tough decision as to which path to follow.
To #7 add another major factor: the “peace dividend” after the collapse of USSR.
Ah, I see, you went with the selective reading of history. The unregulated capitalism of the founding era was still a mixed bag. It created wealth for our country and laid us on a path of stability and eventual freedom. But it also laid the seeds of the Civil War by not regulating a morally evil economic system, slavery. I also suggest you read a bit more about the Gilded Age, when vast wealth was created, but through imperialism and the virtual enslavement of the working class (company stores, child labor, unsafe working conditions, railroad monopolies that choked out small farmers, urban poverty to rival the Third World). It was the Progressive movement of the turn of the century that helped to change that. Then read about laissez-faire economics and the bubble that burst and created the Great Depression. It was the postwar New Deal consensus that helped to change that.
Communism is certainly not the answer. You are right, it was an unmitigated failure. I personally don’t know what the answer is, but I’m inclined to favor a healthy balance of government regulation and private industry. It is the extremes of communism and laissez-faire that seem to have caused the most harm in our history. Your rose-colored depiction of conservative virtue still seems unfounded.
[i] virtual enslavement of the working class [/i]
A Progressive dream that simply created Democrat party voters.
No part of human history is perfect…….it’s because of those darn humans! But the unparalled freedoms enjoyed in this country through our Constititional government uleashed the human power of discovery and innovation in a way the world has never seen. And the end result was wealth creation and the broadest participation of a middle class the world has ever seen.
Anything less, will result in less. The history is there to read; you can be as selective as you want. Socialism, communism, or a dictatorship did not create the American miracle. Americans, individuals, free to be the best they could be and to make as much of their lives as they could, and to chase their dreams as hard and fast as they wanted, created the miracle that is America.
And I am enthusiastically looking forward to a return to an America of rugged individualism that faces a challenge with a “can do” attitude rather than sitting around wringing its hands waiting for Government to so something.
[blockquote] A Progressive dream that simply created Democrat party voters.[/blockquote]
So #17 I guess this is all part of the American Dream?
[http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/childlabor/childlabor.html]
Mitchell, what’s your point? That children, women, and men had a tough time during the early years of the industrial revolution? Sure they did until society figured out how to best run its affairs for all. But [i]enslavement?[/i].
Look at pictures of early pioneers in the early west settlements and on farms. They worked as hard or harder and looked just as forlorn; children, women, and men. Yet did anyone consider them as slaves? No, the “enslavement” rhetoric is just that, rhetoric; used to justify Progressive solutions that really underlay the formation of bigger and bigger government in the guise of compassion and with less freedom and liberty for all. Long before Progressives figured this as a way to grow government, church groups in the US and in England were attacking the problems.
Not only do you not see children in the mills anymore, you pretty much don’t see teenagers in the workforce at all due to an economy near depression levels and the wonders of the minimum wage and the taxation which employers have to pony up to let teens do any work. Thanks for bringing up the topic.
Actually, one sees teenagers in the workforce in a lot of places, but (at least in these parts) they are only seen in areas which don’t have good access to Latin American immigrants or where good English is considered important (alas, this seemingly doesn’t include manning the drive-through at McDonald’s). My local grocery store is full of them.
And really, the conspiracy theory of progressives is bizarre. It’s pretty obvious that the “problem” is not that they specifically want to expand the government, but that they don’t care whether it is expanded.
Church groups were attacking the problem, in part by lobbying the government for Progressive reform. There was no Middle Class before the Progressive Era. And those hard-working Western farmers generally became Populists and Progressives when facing railroad monopolies that charged “all the traffic would bear” to carry their produce to market. American history is so much more complex than rugged-individualist farmers on the frontier. Hey, if you want to build a time machine and go back to live in the 1840s, go for it, but don’t take the rest of the country with you.
You’re right, government can go too far. I saw that when I lived in Massachusetts and we see that in California all the time. I personally believe we need conservatism, to keep the excesses of liberalism in check. It’s utter confidence in either extreme that I object to.
Constitutional Conservatism, which I have written about many times, is not an extreme. It points to the foundational aspects of this country. Anarchy, no government, would be an extreme, just as Uncle Joe Stalin’s Russia was a dictitorial extreme.
Farmers and Frontiersmen as populists makes all the sense in the world and their first goals were local in nature or statewide/territory wide. Populists and Progressives are two different animals. Populists want checks and balances in life; Progressives see the refinement of mankind as only coming through government. And there is not a single Progressive issue that does not in one way or another circle around to “more government”.
And for those who find rugged American individualism to be an offensive idea; it sounds like your electoral choice in 2012 should be quite easy.
I didn’t say it was offensive, I said American history is more complex than that. Populists and Progressives were different, but they frequently allied on a variety of issues. 19th century Populists often did agitate for Progressive reforms such as federal regulation of railroads, banks, working hours, etc…. They absolutely were involved on the national level (supporting presidential candidates like William Jennings Bryan). You do have a point though. On an intellectual level Progressivism then was and now is largely driven by positivism and in many ways by Social Darwinism. But I’ve always felt that their reforms were laudable even without that misguided need for societal perfection.
Capt. Warren, you are awfully free with your statements of what other people want and what other people think.