More about the Blue Collar Great Depression :
SUM: I’ve never seen, Dan, in any postwar recession such a one-sided, lopsided view of who has been affected.
Sum heads the Center for Labor Market Studies at Boston’s Northeastern University. He’s one of the few economists to focus on huge differences within the overall unemployment picture. He says the brunt of the recession has disproportionately affected blue collar workers in manufacturing, transportation and especially construction and that the results have been devastating here in Ohio and across the nation.
SUM: The rate of decline among these men was equivalent to the rate of decline in the great depression of 1929-33.
The hardest-hit blue collar jobs have unemployment rates three to five times as high as white collar professionals.
Tom Fisher knows the blue collar struggles first hand.
He’s a truck driver from Olmsted Township.
On the day I met him, he was pulling into a warehouse parking lot after an overnight trip to upstate NY.
We climbed into the cab of the Truck Fisher drives for a company that makes insulation for commercial buildings.
Commercial real estate —like residential real estate— has taken a dive. With less building and rehabbing going on there’s less need for insulation and less need for Fisher.
FISHER: Three years ago, I was working 50-55 hours a week at this one company. And everything over 40 was time and a half, which is good money, very good money for me.
Now he’s lucky to work a couple days a week, working maybe 20 hours. No overtime. He took a second job late at night at the Plain Dealer, helping prepare stacks of papers for delivery. It’s tough work, for not a lot of money. His income fell by $12,000 last year.
FISHER: I live from paycheck to paycheck and when you’re $12,000 less, I’m not paying certain bills. Creditors are not happy. I’m having troubles at the banks trying to get money in on time to pay the bill. And it’s just a vicious circle. I just don’t feel I’m getting anywhere.
And, Fisher knows he’s one of the lucky ones. Like many blue collar workers, he’s underemployed, meaning he works part time but desires full time work. But having some work is better than many of his peers. He knows a lot of independent truck drivers who just went broke.
FISHER: Well, I know two guys personally that just left their trucks right at the truck stop and walked away. Called their wives. The wives came and got them, and just left them and let the banks come get them. Freight on them and everything. They just could not do it anymore.
Unemployment in the transportation sector doubled during the recession. But that’s still not as bad as another sector.
FISHER: A lot of places I go to is construction sites. And some of the big construction companies around here are down from 400 men crews to 8,10, 12 men crews.
That might be an exaggeration but the data does show that unemployment in construction is more than double the national average, triple what it was at the start of the recession. It’s also been especially rough on small firms.
In court appointed work, I see this first hand. a union bricklayer who has run through his unemployment, has a 10th grade education and a hearing loss…all he knows is bricklaying and he is 54. He and his wife and child are living on her disability and food stamps; stressed, they entered the child welfare system and I represented him for a time.
Over and over, I am seeing families with long standing work histories rendered homeless and unstable.
Besides the fact that I care, what these folks care about is work. They have always worked, but when 100 people apply for the same job, 99 walk away empty-handed.
At the same time, I see delapidated schools and public buildings, loose cobble stones, pot holes every where, rusted bridges, and holes where construction projects began and stalled in every city and town I visit all across the state. Whether it is the Filene’s Hole in Boston, the dirt pile where Symmes Hospital once stood in Arlington, or the abandonment of the projects slated to go up on the Greenway, every one of these stalled or abandoned projects is taking a toll in human lives through lost jobs and quality of life.
Further, the unemployment among youth is sapping the work ethic, destroying retailers and malls, and creating a downward spiral.
As Democrats, we must address these problems because our Democratic values support putting everyone to work, and freedom from economic fear.
Also, as a practical matter, without serious job growth, we will lose in the coming elections. Frankly, there are more blue collar workers in America then professors and high flown rhetoric won’t pay mortgages, car payments, tuition or buy food.
We have an honorably discharged veteran living with us, a friend of our sons. Forty job applications so far – and no work. My husband, with a 44 year history of continuous employment has been out of work since May of 2009. And as for the indigent clients I am appointed to represent, well, it is unemployment that has rendered two out of three of them indigent.
I don’t have the luxury of being in denial about the extent of unemployment among ordinary people, outside of government employment, health care, and white collar work.
Unemployment insurance is like a bandaid; better then bleeding all over. More cuts, layoffs, and downsizing will make the problem worse and add to the over supply of labor, and the downturn among retailers.
When I drive through my town there seem to be more vacant store fronts every week. Is that true where you live, too?
And it sure is hard to find labels that say, “Made in Massachusetts” these days.
Useful trades and people who work with their hands are scorned by liberals as not quite sharp enough to have a REAL job like real estate or accounting.
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p>And you’ve outlined the single biggest failure of ‘stimulus’ money. Using the funds to prevent government layoffs will not stimulate or grow an economy.
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p>I went to a ‘ribbon cutting’ today of a state project – ARRA money, etc. $40 million – and Gov. PAtrick told us it could generate TWO HUNDRED jobs!! Whoo!
And all work is real work. I don’t scorn any of it; you are wrong if you think ‘people who work with their hands are scorned by liberals’ – as my mother always said, while it is fine to have a profession, you had better have a trade, as well.
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p>Myself I do jewelry construction and repair, and part of how I worked my way through college was that profession, along with data entry.
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p>In addition, both my husband and I have been restaurant cooks. Betcha if you or I had 40 million dollars to work with we could generate more than 200 jobs.
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p>Hey – here is an idea – what about a post on both RMG and BMG, kind of a competition, as to what jobs could be generated with 40 million dollars? Mind you, business plans and designs are not my area of expertise, but among the thousands of visiters to the two sites, wonder what something like that would generate.
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p>Myself, I would target a Civil War heritage park with re-enactments and family activities – in Springfield. What do you think? Anchored by the Springfield Armory and spinning off restaurant meals, shops selling civil war reproduction clothing and foods, etc.
We’ve gone from being a place where people could work and produce tangible things to a place where we have cubibles and telephones and produce little of any tangible value. Even industries like farming which sustained families for generations have become robotic. This is not a Luddite rant, but a plea that ‘every child should go to college’ is a foolish solution for job growth.
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p>I’m also puzzed how job creation has turned into two things – construction and road building. Truth is, while the Landers and Edwards of the world will do handsomely, as will their employees, the fields are so narrow that not many NEW jobs are created.
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p>We need to start a program like the micro-loans in India for people here insead.
We didn’t passively “go to” an information economy, we intentionally invested in it, and created decades of prosperity in Massachusetts for thousand of Massachusetts residents. Sadly, the engine of that prosperity looked far shinier and wonderful when it bought houses, condos, BMWs, and toys for the information workers that created than it does now, when that same engine has eaten those who created it.
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p>Through massive investments in “worker productivity”, we have eliminated virtually all of those places where “people could work and produce tangible things.” Surely you appreciate that “increasing worker productivity” means replacing human hands and eyes with robots, factory automation, and computer hardware and software. The very fact that you characterize those who work in “cubicles” with telephones as producing “little of any tangible value” virtually defines your posture as “Luddite.”
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p>The weapons that electronic drones deliver to targets in Pakistan under the control of operators safely ensconced in secure and safe facilities within the US are just as real as those delivered by the human-piloted aircraft they replace. The blood, death, and destruction they cause is every bit as real. In the same way, the results of workers in cubicles with telephones (and computers) are just as real as the bits of wood, plastic, and metal that their parents produced in now-empty and desolate factories. I assure that the billions of dollars of wealth they created for wealthy investors like Mitt Romney are just as “tangible” as the value an earlier generation of capitalists extracted from the sweat, blood, and tears of those workers you extol.
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p>By the way, India is now too expensive to handle most outsourcing. Those “micro-loans” more often go to people in places like Indonesia, and they are almost never targeted at labor-intensive production operations that you seem to imagine.
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p>The industrial era is over. It was devastating to families and family values, devastating to the environment, and devastating to the fabric of Massachusetts. Instead of flushing ever-increasing amounts of money down the sink-hole of attempting to sustain a dead and rotting way of life, surely we should we be asking how we can best use the enormous personal wealth that currently resides in Massachusetts to create a better, brighter, and most of all more humane future.
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p>Any society that can afford the staggering extravagances of modern Massachusetts culture cannot simultaneously claim to be “poverty-stricken.” The wealth is here. The tragic truth is that it has been so concentrated in the wallets and bank accounts of a handful of enormously wealthy and powerful individuals that an entire generation of workers, their children, and their grandchildren are suffering and dying because they lack access to the basic necessities of life.
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p>When Fenway Park has trouble selling more than ten or twenty percent of its astronomically-priced seats, then we can talk about what we can and cannot afford to provide for our weakest and most vulnerable fellow residents. I’m not holding my breath.
And yet that’s where virtually all investment, effort and recruitment has gone. Amber’s client is a case in point.
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p>And the concentration of wealth you bemoan is the reasonable end product of that targeting. It worked well for those who were recruited – adn left the rest frozen out.
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p>Even today, when you apply for unemployment, the FIRST handout you are given is to get ‘better education’ as a solution – triggering my initial ‘worthless’ comment. A middle aged bricklayer isn’t likely to get a tech job before the dozens of recent college grads living in mom’s basement, a casualty of white collar oversupply.
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p>Amber and I were discussing the very real blue collar depression, and the lack of will to solve it.
The point I’m trying to make is that during decades of GOP-led Massachusetts “prosperity”, we created the blue-collar depression that we now, belatedly, acknowledge.
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p>I don’t recall any complaints about concentration of wealth during the years of the “Massachusetts Miracle”. I don’t recall any objection to shifting our culture from the “industrial economy” to the “information economy.”
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p>Sadly, the victims of the blue-collar economy are not going to be rescued by any of the Republican proposals currently on the table. None. They won’t be rescued by more tax cuts, or by more reductions in state spending, or by blocking health care reform.
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p>To the contrary, if they are rescued at all (and too many will not be), it will be from doing just the opposite.
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p>Those who successfully concentrated so much personal wealth during the past two decades by literally sucking the working- and middle-classes dry now have a special and personal responsibility for helping mitigate the consequences of their own actions.
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p>I don’t see a particular “lack of will” in the bulk of the working and middle classes. Instead, I see a failure of accountability on the part of the handful of very wealthy persons who so successfully drained essentially all real wealth out of our local economy.
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p>I think you may be confusing the Industrial Era of the 1930’s to the Industrial Era of the 1990’s. This country has lost millions and millions of manufacturing jobs since the year 2000. I didn’t hear much about the devastation that those jobs had in this country in 1995, did you? I didn’t hear any worker complaints right before Danaher Tools offshored their Springfield plant to Mexico about 6 years ago. Those guys are sure complaining now though, as their $40k jobs turned into nothing, and I doubt any of those 50 year olds are going back to college.
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p>This country has also lost millions of jobs due to the pursuit of efficiency via mergers and acquisitions. When 5 small companies are gobbled up by one large company, jobs like accountants, programmers, analysts, salespeople, marketers, and many others are consolidated (usually elsewhere) and often eliminated. This not only eliminates competition, it also puts the large company virtually out of reach by new entrants. Feel like competing with Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Amazon? You likely can’t, so in many cities and towns in this state there are no more bookstores.
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p>So let’s review — it’s a trifecta. Jobs lost due to sending them overseas, jobs lost due to technology, and jobs lost due to consolidation and supersizing. One common denominator — jobs lost. Maybe the economy could handle one of those things, but we’re getting all of them, and it’s not stopping.
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p>It is time we really come to grips with the concept that you mentioned below — that the information economy was not going to include everyone. That means two options: 1) a welfare state, where we basically just pay people to survive. That’s a bad option, because people in a welfare state don’t tend to pull themselves out by their bootstraps, they tend to have kids who are no better in life. Or 2) Recognition that we need to craft an economy with a place for nearly everyone, even those who are not capable of graduating high school. How? Manufacturing jobs, and the jobs they bring with them.
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p>Offer conservatives a choice — higher prices for goods, with the potential for the Next Big Breakthrough to be discovered here rather than Bejing, or higher taxes and more welfare for the people who will never cut it in the New Economy. Or maybe more prisons at $45k per occupant.
First, we can, through regulation, provide disincentives for Big Boxes and incentives for local stores. People are willing to buy local when we create good competition — I think a perfect example of that with your B&N case is the Booksmith in Brookline. Far from a Barnes and Noble driving it out of business when a B&N moved in a few blocks away, the Booksmith drove the Barnes and Noble out of business. We could do that with other industries more frequently if we provide disincentives for Big Boxes (get rid of the tax incentives, no more subsidies and credits for them, etc.) and provide incentives for new, start-up competition.
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p>Furthermore, there are other aspects to American society which contribute to the Big Box success. For starters, people are much less likely to leave their jobs and create their own business if they won’t be able to afford health insurance. Making insurance transportable, or creating a single-payer system, would have an affect on those willing to take a risk and start up a business.
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p>The ever-increasing push to suburban and exurban homes has also had a spiraling negative effect on local businesses. If people can walk down the street or hop on the subway and have a ton of local choices, they’ll do that, but if they have to get in their car and drive 10-15 minutes to get anywhere, they’re that much more likely to drive even a few minutes further — if they have to — in order to go to the Walmart, Target or (decreasingly so) mall. If cities and towns shifted zoning laws to help foster more local business opportunity, creating real neighborhoods where people could walk to things, and spawning dense growth so people are close enough to actually walk and so there’s enough people living in the area to bring in business, there would be far more opportunities for success — and those hyper local businesses would be in better position to compete with Big Boxes or national chains.
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p>Lastly, I think there’s a lot of merit in providing micro-loans and other small business loans or credits for people willing to start small businesses. I’d even go further and provide even more incentives for people to start small businesses — reduced tax rates over the first few years, etc. Doing that in combination with the above would provide much more incentive for people to start businesses, grow jobs and kick start a new economy that’s actually tangible and which isn’t at risk of being shipped out of state or country.
I agree that we need to do more to support small, locally-owned businesses. More in terms of cities and towns supporting them and more in terms of each of us as consumers supporting them over chains and big box stores.
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p>In order to do this, there will need to be a concerted effort on the part of local development boards and taxing authorities. They have the ability to provide tax breaks and incentives to help these small businesses get off the ground, without which they will never even give it a shot.
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p>I walk through central Square frequently and am depressed by the continued slide in what was once a vibrant area with unique and local shops. Now there are empty storefronts and banks, lots of banks and more on the way. Yes there is still the local flavor, but not what it used to be (sort of reminds me of the transformation of Harvard Square from an eclectic mix of stores to a series of faceless chain and bank stores today).
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p>I was shocked that Pearl Art closed and was excited at all the opportunities that people had for the building. Could we have local clothing stores, local food, etc.? Then I heard the annual taxes for the building and became depressed again. $130,000 a year or over $11,000 a month. Now the City is talking about how great it would be to have a TJ Maxx in that location.
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p>Yes it will take work. Work to shepherd through the necessary tax concessions. Work to ensure that local people are hired into these opportunities. Work to ensure that local people give these businesses a shot rather than going to a big box store.
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p>I think its worth it to know the person from who you are making a purchase. Worth it to know that if you forget you money you can always pay again the next time you are in (try that in any national chain). Worth it to have a place for people to seek the start of their working years or have extra hours to have a little extra as they enjoy their retirement years.
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p>Think of the opportunity of filling all the empty storefronts across the state. How many people could go back to work. How much more of a local economy could we have. All it takes is work, forethought and everyone to stop shopping on Amazon and other non-local stores and get back to shopping with people you know, people from your town.
You wrote:
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p>The rub here is that the storefronts are empty because consumers have nothing to spend. It does no good to fill them when consumers have no ability to buy stuff from the new stores. I suggest that it takes something different from “work, forethought and everyone to stop shopping on Amazon and other non-local stores.” I think it takes a federal stimulus program, specifically designed to spur consumer spending.
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p>While I appreciate that you don’t mean to imply this, there is a different way to interpret your analysis. If “work, forethought and everyone to stop shopping on Amazon and other non-local stores” really are “all it takes”, then we can conclude that our Great Recession is caused by:
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p>I don’t think this is true, and I don’t think you mean to suggest that it is. Therefore, I think that one or more significant factors are missing.
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p>I think our Great Recession is happening because there isn’t enough money in circulation — consumers have nothing left to spend. I think that, in turn, is caused by the excessive concentration of wealth in the hands of the very few who have so much of it. I think there are therefore two alternatives:
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p>Alternative (2) is — yes — redistribution of wealth. Alternative (1) amounts to the same eventually, but is more palatable politically.
Tom, I appreciate your thoughtful comments.
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p>Yes, the current form of stimulus (and I am being kind in calling it that) did not do much to support the ordinary American consumer. Too much was pushed to future years and too much was ineffectively targeted.
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p>However, I still believe that the American consumer has transitioned away from local stores to online sales to the detriment of the local economy and local job creation. While local stores suffered in the fourth quarter Amazon reported a 42% increase in fourth quarter year over year sales. This has a direct impact on local stores and their owners.
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p>Yes, we need more work from government to make it easier for people to spend and invest in their futures but we also need people to take ownership of their futures and that of their local economies as well.
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p>The same people who complain about the loss of local jobs too often (not always) are the same people who shop online to “save money”. I will continue to argue that it does not save money in the long run and for all of those who are concerned with the environment, please take a look at the packaging and shipping involved in an Amazon purchase and consider the impact you have on the environment compared to purchasing, for example, a book at your local bookstore (if you are lucky enough to still have one).
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p>It is the small local economy that will help bring us back to greater prosperity, it deserves our support.
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p>Again, thanks Tom for your comments, greatly appreciated.
The increase in the sales tax is a problem for local retailers.
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p>A lot of sales have gone to New Hampshire or now amazon at 0% and once people are established in their buying habits they aren’t coming back.
When I’m running as fast as I can to keep a roof over my head and food on the table, I literally can’t afford to invest in the long run by walking away from significant discounts offered by online and national big-box stores.
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p>I also strongly suspect (though I’m not sure) that shipments from the publisher to, for example, Brookline Booksmith are packaged about the same as shipments from Amazon to me — the bulk of the environmental impact is in moving dead trees from a publisher to a far-distant consumer. I suspect that a better solution is to deliver that content electronically, and print it locally (using recycled paper) on the few occasions when hard-copy is required. Havre, Montana is another example.
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p>I strongly and enthusiastically agree with your emphasis on buying local. In my view, effective use of modern communication technology is central to the success of that strategy. The web promises to allow huge numbers of people to work from offices near their homes. That alone can revitalize huge numbers of exurban cities and towns, restarting the local economy in those places that was killed by the automobile in the fifties and sixties (I’m thinking of places like Ayer, Townsend, and so on). I offer Littleton, New Hampshire, as a case in point.
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p>One of the ways that we destroyed local economies was by building a culture where the overwhelming majority of people work somewhere far removed from where the live. That same culture destroyed millions of families by depriving children of the opportunity to know their parents (both parents) at work as well as at home.
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p>In my view, a massive federal investment in the web analogous to the similarly massive federal investment in the interstate highway system will do wonders to revitalize the local economies that the interstates destroyed.
I do think shortsightedness and national chains of all kinds do contribute to the recession. If more money was secured to local, small businesses, that money would be recycled in local communities, and lift more families into the middle class, instead of being sent off all over the Globe to wealthy investors and shareholders who aren’t going to spend nearly all they earn in the year.
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p>Furthermore, policy that seems unrelated often isn’t. The fact of the matter is the Fed did add all that money into circulation that you wanted; it just went to the wrong place, huge national banks, which is at least tangentially related to my point and is certainly tied to “planning.” If we didn’t have so much focus on huge, national everythings, perhaps we wouldn’t have so many huge, national banks. Banks are certainly the biggest reason why we almost fell completely off the economic cliff. If Bank of America were split up into 1,000, small competing banks, would we have ever needed that $10 trillion (yes, trillion) we infused those banks with? If they were all, local downtown banks with no more than a few banks in a chain, instead of having a Great Recession, we may have only had a small hiccup.
Given that there’s a lot of private industries struggling in this new economy to provide services most would deem necessary, it may be necessary for the government to fill in the gap, which would certainly create jobs, in many cases for people in the very industries losing them. This could be for anything from media and news to health care. I, for one, would love to see something akin to the BBC in America with the downward spiral that is network television, but there’s probably an even greater need for local news. Alternatively, or perhaps in addition, we could look to create incentives and provide funds for nonprofits to pick up the slack.
I would love a micro-loan program in the United States, or even here in Massachusetts. I’d take that idea further and incorporate it with an Amberpaw idea, which would be to create a state bank like the one in ND, which services college loans, small business loans and local bonds (among other things). I remember Amberpaw’s diary (ies?) on that a while back and how its helped keep ND fiscally solvent, while providing opportunity for a great deal of people.
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p>Couple that with our state health exchange, which would allow people to leave their current work and make a start up without losing health insurance, and I think we could do something exciting here.
There would be fewer Republicans in office:
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Oh right – he probably didn’t realize that you can make a living laying bricks.
The speech
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p>Emphasis added Maybe what I am is a Roosevelt Democrat?
Listening to the Party leaders, apparatchik and sycophants, one gets the impression that we are a defeated people, fit only to satisfy the needs of an elite. They harbor a pompous contempt for the people whose labor brought forth a mighty nation such as the world had never seem.
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p>Maybe what we need is for the soft-handed, educated-beyond-their-limits-of-common-sense social architects to get some real work (and take away their trust funds). When these people talk about jobs, the first thing they do is build roads. Now, while road building is a worthwhile enterprise, it does not generate much in the way of jobs. This was demonstrated in the Johnson Administration. People with picks and shovels don’t build roads anymore. Machines build roads. Roadbuilding is capital, not labor intensive. (Why, in Massachusetts, even the traffic guides are cops that already have jobs.)
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p>(Maybe there are a few Roosevelt Democrats somewhere, but where would we find a Roosevelt?)
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p>;o)
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p>“Labor disgraces no man; unfortunately, you occasionally find men who disgrace labor.” –Ulysses S. Grant
To be able to balance your own checkbook. Follow the news and make informed decisions. A chance to grow up enough to know your own abilities and interests. More cars are getting repaired and driven longer – I bet unemployment among those who repair cars and computers is minimal. And yes, I support the Right to Repair bill – I would like neighborhood repair guys to be able to repair all cars.
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p>I am tickled albeit concerned that Toyota has millions of recalls and Ford, none. Way to go, Ford.
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p>And I don’t discount the laboratory jobs. Automation has made goods cheaper (go to Lowell and watch the film!) but it has not made us cumulatively wealthier nor has it made goods more beautiful or durable.
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p>I wish I were as good at answers as I am at asking questions. Micro loans? But first there needs to be a plan as to a product or service, doesn’t there?
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p>Is there still an unmet need for quality small home daycare centers?
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p>Is there still an unmet need for subsidized home foster care slots?
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p>Is there still a chronic unmet need for tutors for those who cannot pass the MCAS without one-to-one tutoring?
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p>Are there enough jewelry repair and watch repair shops (or does everyone get $1.99 watches from WalMart, full of lead and cadmium, made in China and just throw them away to contaminate land fills?)
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p>Anyway, off to work. I have a client to meet with in Fall River which is a hike from Arlington. When children are taken from parents in Probate and Family Court (watch out what you say in front of a judge – if both parents bad mouth one another the Department of Children and Families may get your kid) the parents may reside about anywhere and mostly, no car and little money and not the kind of work where you get paid time off so client visits? Mostly night and weekend, ditto unannounced visits to kids in foster care.
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p>Have a good day – and tell me, what would YOU like to see made in Massachusetts?
You wrote: “I am tickled albeit concerned that Toyota has millions of recalls and Ford, none. Way to go, Ford.”
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p>What do you mean?
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p>Ford has done some pretty massive recalls in past few years. Here’s one from last year. 4.5 million vehicles.
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A parts supplier, Texas Instruments, did provide Ford a faulty part; not a Ford manufactured part but rather a part Ford relied on.
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p>Still not a good thing, granted. But I do drive a Ford not a Toyota as a matter of choice.
And cheerfully put my mother through college – she got a phi betta kappa and a masters and he never graduated college and it didn’t bother him that she had one that I could tell – he grew a dental lab, sold it, and said that selling it was a big mistake. He loved working with his hands – and taught us to love working with both our hands and minds. He is still going strong at 98.
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p>He considers that the purpose of government is to ensure that everyone has enough, and keep the greedy from gobbling up too much; his example of Greedy Gobblers was,and is, of course Wall Street.
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p>He still receives and reads the New York times and argues with me about everything.
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p>He was a Henry Wallace ultra liberal in his day and has always considered me a conservative. Go figure.
Anyone who is ASE certified is no dummy. Congrats to your offspring, He/she has my full respect.
We need more vocational education in our system, not less.
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p>Plumbers make more per hour than most folks with a liberal arts Bachelor’s…and how are ya gonna outsource that?
…everyone upon high school graduation has the academic credentials to pursue college if that is his/her wish.
That’s just not true, and never has been.
I don’t even know what you’re responding to here. Did you even read my comment?
Rep. Ryan’s plan increases taxation on all but the upper crust.
A lot of the policies you guys want destroy these jobs.
Carbon taxes
High energy prices
High investment taxes
Employer mandates
Favoritism for “Jobs of the Future”
Environmentalism
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p>Not saying those things are wrong, but they’re working at cross purposes to the goal of this essay.
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p>Of course the other side has problems too, but they share these policies with the national Democrats:
Favoritism to the financial sector
Favoritism to the international
Financial manipulation
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p>etc
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-money paid in million/billion dollar bonuses instead of using that money to lower prices and create jobs.
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p>-subsidies for corporations to build in states, causing the need to raise taxes on middle/working class folks to help balance state budgets.
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tax cuts for the wealthysold as a measure to stimulate the economy using the theory of “trickle down economics.”The last 10 years has been an experiment on that theory, which proved it to be false.
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p>~corporate externalities that cause middle class tax payers
to pay more in taxes to cover these burdens. One might consider that low wage jobs pay poverty wages, therefore these employees are eligible for state subsidies that cause middle class taxpayers to pay more of there own wages in taxes to cover those costs, while corporations continue to siphon off huge profits. The cost of corporate externalities is far reaching. Even the stock markets frenzied buying and profit taking artificially inflates the cost of goods: oil being a strong example. The value of oil is driven buy the greed thirsty brokers on wall street, not the actual cost value of the product. This creates the externality of increased cost at the pump, causing less money to flow in other directions in our economy.
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p>Unfortunately, this has been the case lately:
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p>If this is a part of the Democratic platform, I want no part of it.
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p>There will be no jobs until the middle/working class has discretionary dollars to spend. You can pump federal and state dollars into all sorts of job creating proposals, but those taxpayer dollars cannot sustain the continuing success of those proposals. It has to be the economy itself that creates and sustains job growth.
tax cuts for the wealthy is a failed policy
Those policies destroyed US jobs because companies were allowed to skirt the rules and go to other, more desperate countries for their manufacturing, in pursuit of profits.
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p>Should the US eliminate pollution laws to compete with China? Or remove workers rights? Or remove child labor laws?
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p>Here is a quote from a post on another blog that is almost spot on:
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p>I think that few people would disagree with all but the last two. I think that the people of this country would accept higher prices in exchange for jobs returning to this country.
*Carbon taxes
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p>Money here goes to one of two places. Either the business gets more efficient and uses less energy, or they pay the tax. If they use less energy, they have more money on hand with which to pay workers. The incentive here can actually save jobs. On the other hand, if they pay the tax, the money doesn’t just disappear; it goes to government programs which pay people salaries and help other people stay employed.
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p>* High energy prices
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p>Drives innovation towards “green” technologies. These “green” companies employ people too, you know. Also, high energy prices incentivise energy efficiency, which I’ve already covered above, and won’t beat a dead horse.
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p>* High investment taxes
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p>Not sure on the specifics of what you’re talking about here, but I’m assuming you mean something like taxing capital gains like income. Firstly, the increase in taxes goes to government spending, see above. Secondly, I don’t actually see this significantly decreasing investments. We are nowhere near the peak of the Laffer Curve, and sound investments will still feature good returns.
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p>This will, however, encourage investments in sound ideas, instead of the speculative hey-day of the dot-com boom. Now, maybe this is a good thing, maybe this is a bad thing. I’ll leave that to the reader to decide.
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p>*Employer mandates
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p>You’ll have to elaborate on this. Are you talking about, e.g. the Massachusetts healthcare reform that mandated employers provide health insurance, etc? Because, of course, a huge part of the problem here is not so much the mandate but the cost of the mandate. If the cost were reasonable, I’d argue that the money goes to other companies that provide other jobs. But at the current costs, I’m afraid I do have to agree that it’s strangling the economy. Just not as much as millions (more) uninsured people would, without these sorts of mandates.
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p>*Favoritism
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p>Agreed on this one. We should do what is necessary to ensure an adequate high-bandwidth network (it is the future now, after all), as well as other economic and societal necessities but otherwise not show favoritism to particular sectors. Note that the degree of “necessariness” will vary by reader. Note also that we have been showing huge amounts of favoritism to grain farmers and the petroleum industry for decades…
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p>*Environmentalism
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p>You mean other than carbon taxes, energy prices, and “favoritism”? I think I’ve addressed those, so do tell what you mean here…
The basic mistake you are making is to see government spending as equivalent to regular consumer spending, and private investment as equivalent to government investment. Private investment is directed towards making the money grow, and this directs it at the businesses that are most productive. Government could do that, but tends not to in practice.
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p>To some extent private consumer spending does the same thing, by rewarding the best producers, but those people could be overseas, or people can spend on junk, they have no interest in really making Procter and Gamble get bigger when they buy a box of Tide.
People tend to see taxing and “government spending” as taking money out of the economy. That is not necessarily so.
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p>Let’s say that the government figured out a way to tax money that would otherwise only go to purchase some kind of unproductive goods from China, and it then spent the money on local services such as building high-speed internet to rural areas. That tax/spend program would actually keep money in the local community as opposed to sending it to China, and it would improve the long-term economy as people got plugged into the internet and were able to contribute to the economy in ways they could not before.
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p>I also don’t think that private spending “is directed towards making the money grow”. Paying executives huge salaries does not make money grow. I think it is not fair to use the theoretical definition of private spending but a jaded definition of public spending.
Private spending in small businesses make “the money grow.”
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p>Private spending in financial companies turns the money trees into dust.
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p>If people are making more money than they’re spending, that’s not really contributing that much to financial success. That money gets pulled out of the economy and doesn’t grow anything anymore. Unfortunately, with giant companies, more of that money ends up going to places where it doesn’t get spent anymore — high paid execs and CEOs.
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p>This isn’t to completely vilify big businesses, at some level we need some of them, but government policy should be one that makes it easier for start-ups to complete with the big boys on the block, and one that prevents the big boys from becoming anything close to resembling monopolies, even regionally.
Instead of the stimulus money going to construction jobs which would really help – a lot of it is going to certain favored sectors – nursing, teaching etc. These are honorable professions of course – but economic stimulus should go where its needed most – construction, manufacturing and trades. With our underfunded infrastructure its work we desperately need done anyway.
40% tax cuts — and roughly a $1 billion short of where it should have been — and think of what we could have done for the industries hardest hit by this recession. Anyone remember the squabbles in the Senate over funding public school construction? The House gave money to help fund new schools across the country — the Senate stripped it away. Public transportation was also severely underfunded. We needed a second stimulus in this recent jobs-bill brouhaha, but it was a laughable-if-not-for-the-consequences bill.
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p>I feel a little ashamed to be an American when the Government can’t manage to spend some money at the time of greatest need to put people back to work to jump start the economy, while it has no trouble throwing away trillions over fruitless wars and stringless bailouts that preserve bonuses in the billions.
Massachusetts is near the bottom of the rating for being a business friendly state.
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p>Manufacturing companies offer good blue collar jobs at good wages, but they operate at tight margins (as opposed to the googles of this world). They also offer jobs to employees who may not have a high school diploma but are willing to learn a trade.
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p>Every new mandate, fee or tax increase makes it harder for them to exist.
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p>Now the vocational high schools have stopped being a source for new employees, I believe it’s a unintended consequence of the MCAS test (which are fine for regular high schools) – academics have become more important to the vocational schools then learning a vocation.
I’m sorry, but I just fundamentally disagree that our taxes in this state — which are statistically below average for the country — have been what’s made manufacturing companies “harder… to exist” in Massachusetts.
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p>What makes manufacturing harder in Massachusetts, and the US in general, is we don’t pay our workers $1 a day. I think our outdated infrastructure and emphasis on carbon-based technology also keeps us down, but Lynn will never be the Shoe Making capital of the world ever again, and Lowell’s not going to regain the spinning capital, either. The best we can hope for is to push for fair trade provisions, to spare our remaining industries, which are still an important part of our state, because we can’t compete so long as other countries are able to completely ignore safety and environmental standards and pay sweat-shop-like salaries.
The ranking has nothing to do with wages, but to do with tax and business policies. For example our state has the highest unemployment taxes, hire more employees get hit with a per head tax.
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p>Our state certainly isn’t going to be a leader in the manufacturing of low cost items, neither is the US. But there are 1000’s of small and medium sized businesses that make niche and specialty products. Firms in Massachusetts, make freezer packs for pharmaceutical, metal stampings, retro-fit electronics for machine tools, industrial computers, electronic sensors, composite parts. The list goes on and on.
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p>None of these firms individually is a lot of jobs, but add them all up and you have a huge amount of jobs.
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p>PDF link below
http://www.taxfoundation.org/f…
for people who are unemployed if we didn’t charge those unemployment taxes.
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p>Massachusetts has survived the recession better than most and is poised to come out of it stronger than most other states. That much is statistical fact. I’m sure there are things we could do better — I pointed one right off the bat, our lousy, outdated infrastructure. However, I don’t think taxes is what’s driven businesses out of Massachusetts and I don’t think cutting them more than we’ve already done is going to be what brings more of them here, or would spawn more start-ups, at least anywhere near as much as investing in public transportation or public higher education — because at the end of the day, businesses that need high skilled labor will go where there’s high-skilled employees and where transportation for workers, materials and products is easy and efficient.
Sorry, but the campaign spin doesn’t quite match reality. The report cited as showing Massachusetts the “most improved” actually shows Massachusetts remaining at #32.
http://www.bls.gov/web/laumstr… US GOV Bureau of Labor.
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p>Doesn’t quite reflect what they were claiming it said, huh? Do you feel a bit mislead?
Let’s look at this simply: somebody with money (an investor) buys the labor of a worker, and a lump of raw material. The worker turns the raw material into a finished good and sells it for a profit, part of which goes back to the investor. The government takes at certain points in this process: in sales tax on the material, income tax from the worker, sales tax on the finished good, and capital gains tax on the investor.
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p>You can expand this into other areas. For instance the investor could buy the labor of an author to write a book. The raw material there is the mind of the author including his or her education etc.
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p>Ultimately every job, even a government job, has to satisfy this process in some way. The only way for wages and salaries to be increased is to more efficiently connect the investor’s money with the worker’s labor. This is the basis of supply-side economics.
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p>Here are the major impediments to manufacturing in the USA:
1. high investment taxes which make it riskier for the investor to put his money into process initially.
2. our monetary system which changes the value of the dollar according to the whim of the Federal Reserve Board — this is a little more complicated but the effect on manufacturing is that it changes the cost and price of the raw material unpredictably in the middle of the production process, so a manufacturer can lose money from the currency swings. Increases risk.
3. high taxes on the output — again makes it riskier to get into the process.
4. environmental or other regulations. Some of these are good, like clean water, but I believe global warming is a hoax so that’s not worth it in my book. But others specifically oppose taking raw materials as earth rape and seek to stop such work by jacking up the costs. No raw materials, no manufacturing.
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p>#2 is the basic change in our time, which has led to all the downward pointing indicators since the early 1970s. Before this the dollar was linked to a physical commodity — gold — and that is why physical production was at least not disfavored. Once we decided to allow human beings to manipulate the dollar for goals (which at the time were deemed socially beneficial) we favored the financializers who played these dollar manipulations at the expense of physical manufacturers.
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p>The Democrats little part in this is to favor inflation in order to eliminate the debts of their poor(er) constituents. This is what William Jennings Bryan was about. I believe that Bryan was right about farmers getting the shaft from the system, but his idea of what to do about it was wrong and that’s why he lost. But the impulse is still there. The result however has been the erosion of middle class lives by cutting salaries and wages through inflation. Many of the weird cultural efforts of Democratic-types (single moms are great, being poor isn’t so bad, having kids is wrong, etc.) are attempts to rationalize things that indicate our collapsing standard of living.
With a side order of far more powerful unions.
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p>Somehow, they manufacture plenty. And get solid middle class jobs with loads of vacation.
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p>What they also have is a government that is not composed of folks hoping to squeeze more from the Middle Class in exchange for a few shekels from their patrons in the Predator Class.
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p>In addition, they have citizens who don’t vote for people who seek to disembowel them, and they vote out the swine that turn out to have lied when they were ran for office.
They must teach government in their schools.
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p>Remember – NO civics or government taught in Massachusetts for twenty years. Oooops.
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p>That incestuous, more and more hereditary Predator Class is a real problem, allright.
Many, becoming most, people classified as manufacturers are actuall self employed, or employ a limited number.
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p>Upholstering, carpet installation, jewelry fabricating, virtually all artists, etc. – are all classified as manufacturing in MA. Because they make/fabricate STUFF. And MANY are self employed, and do not have that ‘investor’ component.
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p>That’s why I brought up the micro loan idea.
I guess that their time with no pay is investment, as well as their initial outlay for supplies, paid for out of savings, or the wages of the spouse. If they buy it all with credit cards then the card company is their investor.
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p>If they get bigger probably the first place they will look for solid investment is family. That is where capital gains comes in.
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p>As far as artists go, I connect the whole thing. The physical in art was demoted and the conceptual emphasized at the same time as physical money was declared old hat. We thought that this would lead to freedom for the artist, but what actually happened was a greater concentration of market power at the top, by the ultra-rich who were able to set the market, buy the artist low and sell high. Pump and dump (some investors took this literally).