A sad article by the NY Times states 58% of all new jobs created under this administration pay under $14 per hour.
“Lower-wage occupations, with median hourly wages of $7.69 to $13.83, accounted for 21 percent of job losses during the retraction. Since employment started expanding, they have accounted for 58 percent of all job growth”. Is this something to brag about?
Let’s hope the nonsense of dogs on a roof of a car, tax returns, college transcripts, or the phony “War on Women” are just sideshows until the conventions are over and important issues such as budget deficits and according to Joe Biden, a three letter word is discussed, J-O-B-S. Because if you lose your job in this economy, all I can say is there but for the grace of God, go I.
More stimulus in the form of direct spending or tax cuts targeted to those who will spend, thus adding to demand and the need for jobs.
Raise minimum wage to at least $10, possibly $12 an hour. This has both the direct effect of allowing people to come closer to living off what they make and the indirect effect of being stimulative.
Use the tax code to incentivise job creation here and disincentivise job creation overseas.
Give the President a Congress he can work with.
(Funny you should mention college transcripts as a sideshow since I’m pretty sure you’ve been the most demanding to see them on BMG.)
if the minimum wage goes to $12/hour? There are unintended consequences on decisions like this.
The “FACTS” about the President’s story concerning jobs is far worse than his numbers people and handlers want people to know. This is very bad news for Obama.
There is no reason we should be laying off teachers, firemen, and police officers. With interest rates on debt at record lows, why aren’t we repairing our infrastructure?
Are Republicans that eager to have China overtake us?
I interviewed at a company which had MIT graduates doing work for $12/hour. This economy is such a waste, what a waste of five years this has been.
Here in MA the economy is pretty good and there is very strong hiring in high tech. It is clear from my contact with recruiters that there is no shortage of jobs in software in the Boston area and a huge growth of new startups.
The GOP destroyed the economy under Bush, and has done everything they can to keep it weak under Obama, from opposing stimulus to bringing the country to the brink of default. Your are right to criticize Obama, but for being too accommodating to the Party of Decline (that would be the GOP) rather that moving forward more aggressively. Fewer Republicans, more economic success: the stock market shows it, Massachusetts shows it. If we could defeat Scott Brown, we’d all be still richer.
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Bob, you have to stop with this lame excuse. Obama should know by now that Americans are not interested in how bad the economy was almost 4 years ago when Obama took over. Even prominent Democrats are avoiding the “It’s not my fault” whining!
The problem in 2009 was that it was difficult to get a sufficiently large stimulus measure through Congress. Unlike the Republicans, the Democrats in Congress do not consist of a collection of mindless, order-following legi-bots. It turned out to be very difficult to convince Blue Dogs to vote for a big enough stimulus. Without Democratic unanimity, the unpatriotic plan of Senator McConnell, the leader of the Senate Republicans, was to deny Obama any victories at all. No matter what.
So a weaker, smaller stimulus with too few tax cuts and not enough spending passed Congress — and so we end up with a hobbled economy. The Left complained but the Obama Administration cut us out.
By contrast, every thing that Republicans have done during this downturn– from playing chicken with the debt ceiling, to blocking unemployment benefits, to preventing more stimulus, to creating a ridiculous diversion about the deficit they only care about for political ends, every thing they had done has made things worse.
And so, yeah, if Congress resembled the Massachusetts Legislature, things would be better. If Obama’s unrealistic hopes about Republicans transcending partisanship for the good of the economy had panned out, things would be better too.
Instead Congress gives us Republican policies with Obama in the White House. We’re lucky, lucky that we’re doing better than the UK and it’s economy-killing Conservative government.
stimulus produced more jobs. But instead, it produced hardly any jobs and the ones it did were pathetic. A third tax cuts, a third aid to states to keep people we didn’t need working and a third to jobs so we could get mile markers every .1 of a mile on our highways or on shovel ready projects which Obama himself joked about…
Maybe instead of spending the time, money, political capital and 2 year Democratic majority on OBAMACARE, he could have worked on jobs. That was his mistake and he has made the country pay for it. Now, as he said, he owns the economy. He is responsible and he may be held to a single term for his failure to get things done. Maybe if he worked in more private jobs he would understand that sometimes excuses just don’t matter. Sometimes you get a job which requires you “get it done!”… or else. Well he was suppose to get-it-done, and he hasn’t. Maybe there will be enough enlightened Americans to reward Obama with a victor but I have a strong feeling that Obama’s numbers are actually far worse than the polling is showing (yes, this is a “feeling“).
And I will stick by my prediction (another feeling) that even if Obama wins, if the Senate stays Democratic… that the House will stay Republican and Obama will not be getting the things he wants. We also have Sequestration which will have a serious impact starting Jan/2013, right behind the Bush/Obama tax cuts, which will not consist of raising taxes on the rich and I can almost guarantee will not raise taxes on “anyone”.
is an essential component of dealing with the deficit long-term and all economic (non-anecdotal) studies of the stimulus showed its effects to be substantial.
The Obama Administration underestimated how much stimulus was needed. When they got even less than that, they crowed about having gotten “just the right amount”, and now they’ve painted themselves into a corner politically.
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It is beneath me — and it should be beneath you, too — to make electoral predictions based on “feelings”.
We continue to disagree on how to fix it.
I’m a feelings person and I won’t agree with you that it’s “beneath” me. It could very well be that my feelings are based in explicit and implicit sources, which gives me the confidence in my feelings, but my record is pretty darn good on feelings. My example from earlier was portraying the idea that many professionals and informed people make predictions and are completely wrong. There are times, not always, when I’m happy to be right for the wrong reasons!
I would also want to cap executive pay at a certain multiple (say, 100x?) their lowest paid worker. I have next to no sympathy for big chains and corporations saying they have to cut jobs or raise priaces when the top is sitting fat and happy. Besides, we’ve raised the minimum wage before and it has been a good thing plus I’m only proposing a major catch up in purchasing power over the past several decades. As I said these also have a stimulative effect which I am confident will produce a net gain for all involved.
extend well into our corporations. You will never see such a rule concerning executive pays and I hope we never do. If I owned a company I would pay people whatever I wanted and if it meant $10/hour for low IQ labor vs. $5000/hour for some great skill sets, then I’d pay it happily.
I wasn’t talking about big chains, I was talking about a small sandwich shop, one location trying to survive by selling sandwiches and having to pay sandwich makers (low skills required) for $12/hour.
What seems to have occurred is that executive pay is determined no longer by those excellent market forces that reward success, punish failure, share information, and help the best win.
Instead, what seems to have happened is something very bad in corporate governance whereby upper executives are paid multiples of what they are worth as a result of political power within the corporation.
I don’t think that the rule that Christopher proposes is the best remedy for that, but I do think we should something has gone terribly wrong with corporate governance.
That, too, is why we have so much income inequality: in aggregate, our workforce is not getting monetary rewards for their increases in productivity.
Because I don’t see anything changing? If anything, I see it getting worse as this post has explained. In the process of fixing our economy, where companies are rehiring people, they are correcting previous market forces which caused people’s salaries to rise and now they are being replaced with low paying people.
I may have laid out this scenario before. As I mentioned about the sandwich making place… if you hire people and pay them $8/hour. Then you give them raises every year until eventually these sandwich maker are making $18-20/hour. At that point, you may be paying people more than the market pays for sandwich makers but for various reasons you live with it (maybe you begrudingly make less profit). Suddenly, something happens (2008-2009) and you lay off half your staff. Now as business gets better, you rehire sandwich makers… but at $10/hour.
You won’t see the market pay higher salaries until market demand removes people willing to work for $10/hour.
I’m saying that the people at the topic of the World Sandwich holding company are sucking profits out that would, in years past, have gone to the sandwich makers.
Further, if we make sure that everyone who actually spends money gets much less of it, that depresses demand, depresses the economy, forces everyone to buy cheaper sandwiches.
People at the top not at the topic.
but I still don’t see your solution.
And let’s stop talking about the World Sandwich Holding companies since the vast majority of our economy is small businesses which are the “one location” sandwich shop in my example.
How do we fix this, be as specific as possible which I know if difficult.
I think Federal caps on executive pay are not going to work — else executives start getting paid in jets, yachts, houses, and green stamps. I don’t pretend to understand issues of corporate governance well enough to propose a law. However, most of what I’ve read points in the direction of saying that there really is a problem there. And certainly the news is full of not-very-successful CEOs getting bonuses, raises, and stuff that sub C-level employees would never get if they made similar progress on their objectives.
So I think there’s a problem there, but I don’t know now to solve it.
for acknowledging that President Obama has created millions of jobs under these difficult underlying conditions.
Also, you’re correct that the issue of his college transcripts is nonsense. Not really sure why some people keep bringing it up except for trolling.
There is morally no excuse for this:
“If I owned a company I would pay people whatever I wanted and if it meant $10/hour for low IQ labor vs. $5000/hour for some great skill sets, then I’d pay it happily.”
That’s ten million per year vs. twenty thousand. I can think of no skill worth $5000 an hour and if the idea is to reward success then the person laboring away on the front line at low wage is part of what made the company successful. This is NOT a cap, for the record; I am not proposing a maximum wage or salary; I am asking for the wealth of a successful company to be shared up and down the hierarchy. What has to be acknowledged is that one’s time is worth a certain amount even if he is stuck in a low-skill job. It is unconscionable that someone working full time might be flirting with poverty.
As for the non-chain sandwich shop I also support other incentives and benefits the President has proposed to alleviate the burden. I don’t think I’d have to raise prices all that much and many would find it worth it. If I were running such a shop I wouldn’t hire unless I could pay at least $10 an hour and I may even be tempted to promote myself as a socially-conscious business on that basis. We should not content ourselves with what we think will happen; we must be bold about what should happen.
Hey Dan, I thought that the tea party line was that governments don’t create jobs “job creators” (aka rich people) do. No doubt if we cut their taxes they will pass on the savings to those workers. Right?
I think the GOP accusation is that the Democrats over-promised what economic policy could accomplish, and so they can be held accountable for falling short on promises they couldn’t keep.
This is mitigated a bit by: (1) Obama’s expectation 2008-2009 that the Republicans would be cooperative when, in fact, they took partisanship to an unpatriotic extreme. (2) The Obama Administration’s under-estimation of the extent of the downturn and excessive caution in their approach to repairing it. (3) The unmanageability of the Blue Dog wing of the Party. Remember, for example, the horrid Nebraska compromise on the ACA.
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That said Romney’s promises are airier still. Given that he wants to import Cameron’s harmful policies, there’s no basis for believing him.
I see that you finally realize that the Obama college transcript non-issue was bogus and would like to wish away Mitt’s glaring tax problems.
Like it or not, Mitt’s tax returns are not going to drop out of the equation. Nor should it. If he wants to make cutting taxes on the ultra rich a key part of his economic policy, he damn well better open up his tax returns and show us how overtaxed he is.