Barry Soetero, President of the United States of America???!!!??%@#%%!!!
Posted on 08/26/2013 7:39:05 PM PDT by lbryce
In the four years since the Great Recession officially ended, the productivity of American workers — those lucky enough to have jobs — has risen smartly. But the United States still has two million fewer jobs than before the downturn, the unemployment rate is stuck at levels not seen since the early 1990s and the proportion of adults who are working is four percentage points off its peak in 2000.
This job drought has spurred pundits to wonder whether a profound employment sickness has overtaken us. And from there, it’s only a short leap to ask whether that illness isn’t productivity itself. Have we mechanized and computerized ourselves into obsolescence?
Are we in danger of losing the “race against the machine,” as the M.I.T. scholars Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue in a recent book? Are we becoming enslaved to our “robot overlords,” as the journalist Kevin Drum warned in Mother Jones? Do “smart machines” threaten us with “long-term misery,” as the economists Jeffrey D. Sachs and Laurence J. Kotlikoff prophesied earlier this year? Have we reached “the end of labor,” as Noah Smith laments in The Atlantic?
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com ...
We could fix the economy in a few simple steps.
1. End ethanol mandates. Let corn go to feed people and livestock. Energy costs and food costs go down.
2. Open up all of the off shore and on land oil drilling sites. Blue collar jobs abound, energy costs come down. Local, state and federal coffers fill with taxes on the energy and permits, while people have more money to spend on luxuries because energy costs come down.
3. Lift the logging restrictions in the West. Let Oregon, Washington and other states log again. We stop importing wood, and we create more blue collar jobs.
4. Green light every pipeline and refinery request that has been sitting on the sidelines. Construction jobs explode, while long term jobs in maintenance of the facilities remain. And energy costs come down further. Then the money consumed with $4 gas and $300/month electric bills can go to restaurants and other expenses.
5. Free the medical industry. Repeal Obamacare. Put in a medical malpractice cap. Rein in trial lawyers. Make health insurance something that can be sold across state lines. Health costs go down, quality goes up.
But this won’t happen under Obama. As I think Dennis Prager said, to liberals, control matters more than prosperity.
The truth is:
(1) free market economies + new technology = jobs destroyed.
But that is only half of the truth, and like all half-truths, it is a lie.
In previous eras, the advent of new technology has led to increasing prosperity, because, even though (1) is correct, the following is also correct:
(2) free market economies + new technology = jobs created.
in general the new jobs created were better, more plentiful, more satisfying, less physical, and created more wealth than the old jobs destroyed.
What's different now is that creative people -- not Hollywood morons or jackasses photographing Christ in jars of urine -- but really creative people have been properly convinced to believe that there is no return on their risk. Therefore, they're sitting back and they're not creating new wealth.
The NYT story is nothing new. Liberals have been saying this crap as long as I've been alive. In the 1950's, when computers were dimly on the horizon as enormous room-filling behemoths I was hearing that there wouldn't be jobs for people any more. But every new computer innovation has led to increasingly lucrative and productivity enhancing work for more people.
Don't believe the lies. What's different this time is that the people who really matter are being trained, slowly but surely, to be like the masses of drones feeding off of them because they see no reason to have their hard work turned over to corrupt politicians, greedy bankers, filthy lawyers, drug abusers and a permanent grievance industry that feeds the lower economic classes.
Indeed, Prosperity = Greater Independence.
Within every public servant, politician, elected official is a desperate closet megalomaniac aching to take control of whatever they can get their grubby little hands on.
That’s part of the problem.
A far larger problem is how many low/no skills people we’re importing through our broken immigration system.
The US economy used to have a labor market that could absorb low/no skill labor in modest amounts. Now, with rampant mechanization and whole industries being off-shored, we don’t. The bottom 20 to 35% of the skills spectrum in the US labor market has no viable job prospects, no hope of seeing wage increases, nothing.
The only way to stop this slide is to cease immigration, expel the illegals and creating a relative shortage of labor in that skills bracket.
The “creative classes” are learning (the hard way) that unless you create something of tangible value, you’re no longer safe either. No one *needs* most of the crap we now produce in the US. In the last 10 years, the US economy has become turned inside-out, becoming based on “FIRE” - finance, insurance and real estate. In ordinary times, these sectors are single-digit percentages of the overall GDP mix. In the last 10 years or so, they became huge contributors to the US economy - and these sectors don’t produce anything of tangible value.
For example, in the early 80’s, the banking/finance/insurance companies in the SP500 contributed about 8% of the whole SP500 index’s earnings. In 2007, these sectors contributed over 23% of the SP500 earnings. When you really get down to it, all these business sectors do is pass little pieces of paper around. That’s it. They claim to be adding value, but they’re not adding any tangible value, and more and more people are now starting to realize this.
Another point to the US economy vs. the 90’s is that in the 90’s, Silicon Valley and the VC’s who funded startups there were creating technologies and companies that added actual value as well. These companies created products that were “force multipliers” when these technologies were adopted by companies and nations.
Today, what’s the hot lick in Silicon Valley? “Social Networking.” WTF is “social networking?” It’s a bunch of people acting like high school girls, chattering and gossiping away over computer networks. How do the companies providing these “services” monetize this stuff? By peddling targeted eyeballs for worthless advertising.
Where’s the value in that? Nowhere that I can see.
It isn’t technology, per se, that’s the problem. It’s our increasingly infantile and trivial use of same.
Our immigration system isn't broken. What's broken is our laws. The group most dangerously breaking the law is the government itself.
The US economy used to have a labor market that could absorb low/no skill labor in modest amounts.
This is partly untrue. I work in agriculture, and I can tell you we are absorbing millions of low-skill non-citizens in agricultural work (much of it in areas that are not considered traditional immigrant/migrant.) Wish we weren't, but we are. I think this is also true in the construction trades and in hotel and restaurant businesses.
The only way to stop this slide is to cease immigration, expel the illegals and creating a relative shortage of labor in that skills bracket.
Ceasing immigration and expelling them is a good start but it will not solve the problem until criminal employers who hire illegals in circumvention of the 1986 law are penalized to the extent that it's no longer profitable to import them. If they jobs are gone, they will not come back. If they still exist, they will.
Low skill workers are not the only problem, either. The H1B visa program (a darling of many conservatives) as currently constituted is nothing more than a system for procuring high-skill indentured servants who suppress wages and shrink the marketplace for US workers, and persuade greedy employers it's cheaper to import cubicle slaves than to keep US workers skill-sets current.
The “creative classes” are learning (the hard way) that unless you create something of tangible value, you’re no longer safe either.
"Tangible value" is a loaded word which has its roots in Marxist ideology, and I won't discuss it because it's either completely determined contextually (in which case there are better words) or has no meaning.
What has value is what people will buy in a free marketplace, PERIOD. The problem with the service industries that you cite isn't that they produce nothing of value; they do. The problem is that what they produce is over-priced because the industries have persuaded the government to assume all of their risk. There is thus no floor in contractions, and there is the moral hazard created by intervention that we saw in the previous meltdown of the financial sector. We have postponed the correction to real value (by which I mean NOTHING more or less than market value.) It is still coming.
It isn’t technology, per se, that’s the problem. It’s our increasingly infantile and trivial use of same.
You are looking in the wrong places if you think our use of technology is increasingly infantile and trivial. Biotechnology, nanotechnology, and many other new areas are improving lives and creating wealth in ways that are neither infantile nor trivial.
Socialism is the most likely eventual outcome, I think. The whole idea of the market begins to break down when machines are able to perform most tasks. If people aren’t able to earn a living because they have been displaced by technology, who remains to buy the products and services rendered by that technology? At some point it all becomes meaningless activity.
Must be all those ATM’s and Kiosk! Liberals are so retarded.
Morality is destiny. In a moral place, technology is just an enrichment. When we have government that socially engineers amorality, we take a nosedive and technology becomes a danger.
Or something like that! ;^)
Our immigration system is broken. It has been since 1965.
I used to be a farmer. The trope from the ag interests that they’re absorbing the massive inflows of no-skill labor is nonsense on stilts. Mechanization is reducing labor requirements in the ag sector quite steadily.
The whole US ag sector employment is going down, per the BLS tables:
http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm
So we’re done with that issue.
Second issue: criminal employers: Too many people think that the vast majority of illegals are employed in rural ag areas. This too is wrong. From 2003 to 2007, I can say without any doubt that about one-third of the people working on construction sites in Nevada were illegals. How did we know this? Simple. All we had to do was look at how many people wouldn’t show up to the job site on the days when it was rumored that the INS was in the area.
The H1B visa program needs to be eliminated, both for reasons of wage deflation in highly skilled (and high student debt) labor markets, but also for reasons of national security. There are far too many “non-classified, but strategically critical” tech industries who are employing H1B’s, some of whom then take our intellectual property back home with them at the end of their visa. The stupidity of tech companies (including my former employer) in this regard is nothing short of absurd. Stockholders should be suing some of these corporations for not protecting the shareholders’ interests.
As for “tangible value:” That’s a term I use to differential what is real and what isn’t. Attaching value to a piece of paper isn’t tangible. You can’t eat it, you can’t build with it, you can’t heal people with it. It has a notational value created by models and soothsayers engaged in mathematical sophistry - eg, CDO’s.
But I go even deeper than that. I’m going directly to what some of the “hot” companies are doing these days. I’ll pick on Facebook, because they deserve it.
Ah, FaceBook. A complete and utter sham. I’ve been through their SEC filings, and sooner or later, someone is going to call them on their fraud. They like to claim that every time someone clicks a “like” button embedded on some other web site than FB, FB counts that as a “visit” for the purposes of peddling their advertising. Sooner or later, the ad revenue is going to fall off when the ad buyers realize that they’re not seeing either the traffic or the follow-through sales from their advertising on FB. There is no real value to FB. It doesn’t increase productivity, it doesn’t increase revenue to its users, it doesn’t *do* anything in the real world.
Sure, it helps grandmothers keep in touch with their grandkids. That’s very nice. It is not, however, a sustainable business model.
In debt as deeply as we are, we can no longer waste money on frivolous pursuits. We’re rapidly approaching a point of no return, and doing things like pissing money down holes that don’t return actual, organic economic growth is a luxury we cannot afford. The Chinese can afford to do these things, because they have a huge current account surplus. They have money coming out their bodily orifices. They can piss it away into apartments with no residents, bridges to nowhere, roads that have no traffic.
We have a huge current account deficit - ie, we’re bleeding capital into other countries.
The paper-passing parts of the economy aren’t being so much subsidized by the government as they are by the Fed, which isn’t the government. The Fed has tried to goose the economy by levering up their balance sheet to absurd levels to buy $2T in paper to crush interest rates, punish savers and low-risk investors and force them into higher risk asset classes to seek a return. The banks, meanwhile, are content to sit on their hands and do nothing, because they know that they’re nowhere close to out of the woods yet.
The smarter move would have been to let the stupid-on-steroids banks fail and move their capital out of the hands of the feckless and stupid and into prudent and sane hands. But no, we decide to double down on stupidity...
Exactly. You still go where you were headed, you just get there faster.
The human race has had steady technological progress since the Renaissance. Suddenly, its a problem. Riiiiight.
Very perceptive, and good memory.
That was when we started feeling sorry for the 'minorities' (nothing to do with race, more to do with a growing supply of idiots) and decided to make long division easier by using gimmicks. After that, there were gimmicks to learn English. I think they called it Phony-etics or something. New Math, New English.
Here we are 30 years later and the products of new math, new english (new history too) are our teachers.
It's not really working.
No they aren't. We have plenty of laws, plenty of good laws. We have too many laws actually, and the main reason we keep getting more is that it is the JUSTICE SYSTEM that is broken.
What good can a law do, if a Judge will convict the lawbreakers ?
The Machines have a Union too. No Juice, no work.
To borrow a quote from Frank Herbert’s Dune series, every revolutionary is a closet aristocrat - they want to be in charge.
And bureaucrats are bad administrators by design; if they worked quickly and efficiently, they couldn’t justify their slow work pace, accumulated power via bribes and reason to increase their headcount.
Luddites.
You missed the point; read the post. The laws we have are being broken, and they are not being enforced.
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