Doomed!
Posted on 12/07/2005 11:46:30 AM PST by Sonny M
The November payrolls job report was announced Friday with the usual misleading hype. Spinmeisters made the most out of the 215,000 jobs. Looking beyond the glitter at the real facts, this is what we see. Twenty-one thousand of those jobs were government positions supported by taxpayers. There were only 194,000 new jobs in the private sector. Of those, 37,000 are in construction and only 11,000 are in manufacturing. The bulk of the new jobs – 144,000 – are in domestic services.
Wholesale and retail trade account for 20,000. Food services and drinking places (waitresses and bartenders) account for 38,000. Health care and social assistance account for 27,000. Professional and business services account for 29,000. Financial activities gained 13,000 jobs. Transportation and warehousing gained 8,000 jobs.
Very few of these jobs result in tradable services that can be exported or help to close the growing gap in the U.S. balance of trade.
The 11,000 new factory jobs and the 15,000 of the previous month are a relief from the usual loss. However, these gains are more than offset by the job cuts recently announced by General Motors and Ford.
Despite the gains, total hours worked declined, as the average workweek fell to 33.7 hours. The decline in the labor force participation rate, a consequence of the shrinkage in well-paying jobs, masks a higher rate of unemployment than the reported 5 percent. The ratio of employment to population fell again in November.
Average hourly earnings (up 3.2 percent over the last year) are not keeping up with the consumer price index (up 4.3 percent). Consequently, real incomes are falling.
This is not the picture of a healthy economy in which growth in high productivity, high value-added jobs fuels the growth in consumer demand and provides savings to finance Washington's red ink. What we are looking at is an economy that is coming unglued from the loss of jobs that provide ladders of upward mobility, and from massive trade and budget deficits that are resulting in unsustainable growth in indebtedness to foreigners.
The consumer price index measures inflation at 4.3 percent over the past year. Many people, experiencing household budgets severely impacted by fuel prices and grocery bills, find this figure unrealistically low. PNC Financial Services has a Christmas price index consisting of the gifts in the song, "The 12 Days of Christmas." The index reports that the cost of the collection of gifts has risen 6 percent since last Christmas. Some of the gifts have risen substantially in price. Gold rings are up 27.5 percent, and pear trees are up 15.4 percent. The cost of labor (drummers drumming, maids-a-milking) has remained the same.
Populations are hard-pressed when the prices of goods rise relative to the price of labor, because this makes it impossible for the population to maintain its standard of living.
The U.S. economy has been kept alive by low interest rates, which fueled a real estate boom. Consumers have kept growth alive by refinancing their home mortgages and spending the equity in their houses. Their indebtedness has risen.
Debt-fueled growth is qualitatively different from economic growth that results from an increase in high value-added jobs. Economists who look at the 3-plus percent economic growth rate and conclude that things are fine are fooling themselves and the public. When the real estate boom ends, what will be the source of new spending power?
Stop confusing me with facts and intelligent discourse.
"I notice that more and more "manufacturing" is highly automated, especially the lower skilled type."
Wanna piss off someone in manufacturing? Take one of the finished prducts off the line and tell 'em it doesn't count towards production because you are taking it back to the engineering lab for QA testing. A guaranteed cussing out where I used to work.
Our "trade deficit" is meaningless in a world economy. All those dollars invested in foreign economies are busily creating huge middle classes in places like India and the Pacific Rim - gargantuan future markets for US-based services. Companies like Wal-Mart, Microsoft, and Intel are expanding into those markets, or soon will, and their consumer purchases will flow right back into the US economy, as American investors benefit from higher earnings in their 401(k)'s and IRA's, as well as from American-based jobs servicing foreign clients. Finally, the real estate market is overheated - in very distinct spots (S.Cal, Boston, Miami) - but that's not true of the country as a whole. Too much gloom and doom, when optimism is far more warranted.
Damn, sounds like Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanon contributed to this chicken little report.
Perpetual pessimism is radioactive.
THE REALITY IS: USA 2005 = FULL EMPLOYMENT
Full employment
Because it's true.
"However, these gains are more than offset by the job cuts recently announced by General Motors and Ford."
Some of those laid-off workers will be hired by their competitors.
I sold a house to an engineer, leaving GM detroit, and moving to a California position, with Hyandai.
I think he gets employee benefits, too.
If that's really true, for one month alone, that's both astounding and disgusting.
Why is that so astounding? On average that's 420 positions per state. For many states and the federal government, their fiscal year begins in October. With a new budget year, funds can be released for a replacement or a new hire.
Yes, the number is large, but like the rest of this opinion piece, the author is only seeing what his blinders are allowing him to see.
And the hypers said free trade will create the good paying jobs in America. The idea is coming through loud and clear that Washington is all hype and no cattle.
There is still LOTS of manufacturing in the states.
Just as an example: The housing market is booming. The makers of windows, doors, siding, roof, lumber, PVC pipe, wire, lawnmowers, fencing products, cabinets, flooring, carpet, furniture, plumbing fixtures, paint, garage door openers, concrete, etc, etc are all doing VERY well right now.
Roberts is a bitter old has-been who decided to get a little attention by bad-mouthing Bush. He used to be a conservative, now he just bitches about "neo-cons".
Or as Sulu says, "OH MY!"
Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor’s Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.
He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department’s Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.
In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.
Dr. Roberts’ latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions—The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx’s Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.
Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper’s, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.
Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.
He is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence.
You're a genius, read it and get back to me.
And most of the people working in those industries are actually putting anything together. They are accounts, sales reps, office people, etc. Do their numbers count as being in the "manufacturing sector?"
You guys are just too damn predictable.
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