Here is a sobering fact. Not too long ago, the largest employers in the U.S. were GM and Ford Motor Corp. these companies offered high salaries and good benefits. Today, the largest employers in the U.S. are Walmart, McDonalds, and Amazon. The common thread with these companies are lower salaries, short work weeks, and minimum to no benefits.
The good news is unemployment dropped to 7.3%. The bad news is it dropped, yet again, for the wrong reason. First off, we lost 74,000 jobs from the June and July totals, because they were never created in the first place. In August, 312,000 Americans dropped out of the labor force, now just 63% of Americans actually work or are looking for work, the lowest since 1978. We all have fond memories of 1978, don’t we? Inflation and interest rates combined over 20%, it was known as the misery index. High unemployment, high energy prices, and a president who wore a sweater and told us to live with less. “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job, a depression is when you lose your job, and a recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his”. Ronald Reagan said than in NYC in Sept. 1980.
40% of the new jobs created were Obama jobs, you know, the low paying kind. Of the 165,000 created in August (soon to be revised down, don’t you worry), 44,000 were in retail, 21,000 in bars and saloons. 3/4 of the new jobs went to women, but they got all the sucky jobs. “War on Women” anyone?
“The U.S. economy has moved from a production to a service economy, whose jobs involve far less pay than the old mfg. jobs. The country has moved more toward finance, and away from production, and that leads to massive inequality. We have this b/c It is here where Corporate America and Middle America’s economic interest diverged, and both the Democratic and Republican parties sided with Corporate America, which allowed factories to be moved overseas, imported cheap products, destroyed good jobs here in America, and in the end, we are not better off.”
The above quote (not exact but close) was from Patrick J. Buchanan, last week on the McLaughlin Group, whom I could not agree more on this issue.
