Republicans said Sunday that the new GOP-led Congress will focus the Senate’s agenda on jobs and the economy. Charlie Baker (and Martha Coakley) ran on jobs and the economy. We know how that turned out.
Unemployment in the USA and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is at 6%, give or take a fraction. The DOW hit a record of 18,000 a short time ago and remains close to that figure. Corporate profits are soaring.
To summarize, 94% of us have jobs and the Economy is Booming!
Meanwhile the Republicans (and sadly, too many timid Democrats) are running on “Jobs and the Economy”.
We have jobs. Most of us have at least two jobs per household; many with a part time job on the side as well. The running joke in Texas a few years ago was, “Governor Perry has created thousands of jobs. My friend who lives in his car has three of them.” 25% of Boston’s homeless have jobs.
We have jobs.
And yet we still can’t feel secure that our retirement will ever materialize. We still live in fear that if one of us (in a two income home) gets sick and cannot work, we’re in danger of losing it all. Our children are saddled with debt once out of college and looking for a way to be self sufficient, but it does not seem even remotely possible even with two jobs. We are worked more than 40 hours at our main job without a request for extra pay, arrive early, work late, work through lunch, because we are in fear of losing that job.
To re-cap, we have jobs, the economy is booming for some, but most of us have no security.
We’re not looking for a free lunch, a handout; we’re not takers.
We simply and fairly want the agreement to be that when we put in our time, our energy, or efforts in a full time job, no matter what that jobs is, we can have a reasonable measure of security.
FDR said it in the 1930’s and it remains true to this day. “What do the people of America want more than anything else? To my mind, they want two things: work, with all the moral and spiritual values that go with it; and with work, a reasonable measure of security”.
Ditch “Jobs and the Economy” and pitch “Work and Security”.
Until Democrats return to this basic reality , we will continue to lose what was at one time, our base.
That’s your best explanation yet regarding your objection to what seems to be a mantra, everyone can agree on, though I could nitpick to the extent that security and living wages also fall under the broad heading of “jobs and the economy”.
It’s a work in progress.
“Work and security” may be better than “Jobs and the economy”. Neither will make even a tiny difference so long as today’s wealth and income concentration continues or intensifies.
More than fifty percent of Americans are one paycheck away from the poverty line. One lost job, one layoff, one unexpected baby and the result is abject poverty — that is not “security”.
In my view, we need to rebuild a society where the average man or woman can spend their time doing something meaningful to them knowing that they and their families are well-fed, comfortably sheltered, and have access to whatever health care they need. The average man or woman should have access to education for them and their children consistent with their desires and abilities. Men and women should be able to do all this with a reasonable assurance that they and their families can expect to continue this for the foreseeable future.
This “American dream” today exists only in nostalgic media pieces, dishonest campaign literature, and the memories of a dying generation of WWII-era parents and grandparents.
I agree that Democrats must return to a “basic reality”. I fear, however, that that reality is far more revolutionary than you suggest. In my view, we Democrats must insist that the ENORMOUS wealth that is now concentrated in the very few at the top of the heap be re-distributed among the many.
To butcher an ancient mystic: “It is not that too many have less than they need, it is instead that a few have so very much more than they need”.
…and stop calling its successful members the “middle class” with dreams of wealth. Labor needs to join forces with all laborers (yes, that means the 25% of Boston’s homeless who are laborers) and realize that most all of us are just a week’s/month’s wages away from being poor, homeless and forgotten.
I learned this the hard way.
” the average man or woman can spend their time doing something meaningful to them knowing that they and their families are well-fed, comfortably sheltered, and have access to whatever health care they need.”
I would be interested in knowing when in American (if not human) history you think this time existed that you want to ‘rebuild’.
The WWII vets you reference would be the first to tell you that during the Depression, work that was ‘meaningful’ was a job – period. Concentration of wealth was not unusual, just like now.
This difference was that you worked for your children and grandchildren. Now, everybody chases their own immediate gratification.
I think the conservative looks at the past thirty years and blames this fact on feminism, the sexual revolution, and possibly multiculturalism. The liberal looks at this and blames deregulation, shrinking the safety net, and the end of Fordism. I think both are at play-neoliberal policies kicked in to limit the ability of a single breadwinner to provide for a family right at the time blacks and women started entering the workforce and the counter culture became commodified into the mainstream. How we reconcile this joe is the key question.
It’s gotta be what policies help families stay intact, afloat and eventually thrive in a competitive global economy? I think how we answer that question can help shape the kind of economy and culture we have.
My mother and both of my grandmothers worked for pay outside the home during this halcyon period, and had for-pay at-home jobs as well like embroidery sewing and piece work typing. Betty Draper is a suburban contrivance, not a majority of women.
It was just acceptable to pay bookkeepers, typists, maids, cooks, waitresses, seamstresses, laundresses, nurses, teachers, assembly line workers, etc. less back then. Those are the women I grew up with.
There have been two and three wage families all through the 20th century.
In the 1904-1970 era, a single paycheck could support a family. If and when a second income was possible, it went to extras. Fortunately, today we have mountains of data for economists and interested others to mine. The facts are quite clear. The single income family was alive and well in the period of 1940-1970. No, not all, not every just a large majority, so large that a new term was coined to describe it. It was called the “Middle Class”.
Too bad most families wanted extras like telephones and refrigerators instead of ice boxes.
It would be nice if porcupine and johntmay could provide sources for their remarkable claims.
These all seem to be the sorts of things some federal bureau gathers statistics on.
*
The extras claim? The “liberal myth” claim (just liberals?) The single income claim?
I grew up in a blue-collar, suburban Detroit household (two parents, three kids) that survived on a single income until the mid-late 70s, when my mom started working (two of us were in high school by then). I can think of one other family on the block where the mother worked. As the kids roamed the neighborhood during the summer and ate lunch and snacks wherever they happened to be, I knew all the moms much better than the dads.
We didn’t live lavishly by any stretch of the imagination, but there was always food, the mortgage got paid, and we even had a TV (upgraded to color sometime in the 70s!). But my dad also did all of the home / appliance / auto repairs.
The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class with Elizabeth Warren
I am just a sucker for data-driven analyses like this.
This video SQUARELY answers the mythology offered by porcupine with facts and data. It is a MUST SEE.
14% of married women were participating in the workforce and this rate continued through the 1950’s.
The most in depth study is:
The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren. This video is a description of her research and findings in the book. It describes the single earner family times (with significantly larger families to support), as having more discretionary spending than todays 2 earner families. Higher quality food, clothes and more for entertainment.
We have begun to discuss wealth inequality, but difficult to understand how much it has effected the quality of life that we have incrementally lost.
Elizabeth Warren is brilliant, brilliant BRILLIANT! It was so exciting to hear that someone with her deep understanding of our current economic woes run for Senate so she has platform to reach more people.
That’s the libertarian American capitalism. It’s all quarterly gains that stay at the top.
I describe an unattainable vision, a utopian goal. I understand that it has not existed and will not exist. Still, like every vision or goal, it implies a benchmark that can be used to measure progress.
I suggest that the Great Depression is an inappropriate comparison — that was, until 2008, the nadir of American prosperity.
I suggest that the literature is chock-full of differences at least as profound as the bromide you offer. Here are some comparison points:
– Ratio of highest to lowest compensated employee in corporations
– Wealth distribution by quintile
– Income distribution by quintile by date — how much new income was generated in 2010, for example, in comparison to 1960, and how was that new income spread across the economy?
– Various ratios for individuals, like savings/expenses, housing/income, etc
– Household formation rate, by age
– Home ownership distribution, by income
A great many people are working very hard for their children and grandchildren today. I suggest that employers and individuals with great wealth (and therefore power) are “chasing their own immediate gratification” with just as much intensity as any working-class men and women — because they have far greater power, they are in fact being much more successful than those they are exploiting.
How many employees today have anything like the job security my mother and and father enjoyed in the 1950s (I’m talking about loyalty of their employers, not government unemployment programs)? What was the likelihood of a layoff in 1955 versus today? For employees who are terminated involuntarily, what was their typical length of service in 1960 compared to today?
The concentration of wealth, by virtually any measure, is at historic levels today. The only time it was comparable was during the run-up to the Great Depression, and it has had the same effect today that it had in 1929. These are objective facts, not political assertions to bandy about. When you say “Concentration of wealth was not unusual, just like now”, you distort the reality of what was happening then and now (or both).
As much as you might wish it, today’s problems are NOT brought on by the selfishness and greed of today’s working class men and women, or any other failure on their part. Today’s problems are instead the direct, predictable, and predicted consequence of systemic economic decisions made by an increasingly conservative US government and put in place during the 1980s.
The very wealthy are plundering everyone else. They are strangling the consumer economy that has made America prosperous for as long as America has been prosperous. They did it once before, and caused the Great Depression. They did the same thing again and caused the Great Recession (in 2008). Sadly, in the meantime, they managed to buy and subvert the federal government so that Barack Obama was just another asset, as opposed to FDR.
is not settled economic fact.
Other culprits: technology. global competition, immigration and women increasing the size of the workforce, working longer (and living longer), greater expenditures on health care, rising housing costs, and a myriad of other contributing factors.
I’m not disputing your central point that something needs to be done, and that severe income inequality is wrong and needs to be addressed. I’m merely suggesting that economic issues are often the result of much larger factors than government policy, and without understanding them the solutions might be misguided.
For 20 plus years the answer has been “get a college degree” and at the end of that we have millions of indebted and underemployed college graduates- so maybe it wasn’t the answer.
It started with Carter. He deregulated everything, mistrusted unions, and refused to do big and bold progressive things like single payer since he was a notorious penny pincher. We had a golden opportunity after eight years of criminal Republican rule to reset the ship on FDR style liberalism and we failed.
And a lot of that is due to Carter, who squandered historic majorities in both houses and an early popularity. His insufficient liberalism led to the Teddy challenge and hemoragghed his base to the likes of John Anderson in the election while labor rewarded his hostility with record endorsements for Reagan. I say this as a great admirer of his foreign and environmental policies, and a great admirer of his post-presidency. But on economics, he started the New Democrat retreat long before Hart or Clinton.
Global competition means low wages because the “job creators” have said that so many other nations work for less. However, bring up the fact that 99% of the developed nations of the world have single payer and/or universal health care, and somehow they’re not interested in global comparisons.
..for having the temerity to get married. She was still grateful for the piecework they let her keep, though.
You are describing a type of job that was always a minority in American employment – the factory/production job with benefits and security. It was never the norm of employment, but has been transmogrified into an ideal to recapture. Working class people(as opposed to middle class) have always known insecurity in employment.
But now, the Academic-Industrial Complex has taught children for decades that ‘meaningful’ work is theirs by right, to entice them into taking out ruinous loans to get their ticket punched to enter this unrealistic fairy-tale marketplace. Kids that did everything ‘right’ according to their elders and betters are now reaping the consequences of this Ponzi scheme.
I consider myself fortunate that I was never taught to consider employment to be a sure and predestined thing. As a consequence, I have rarely been out of work during my adult life.
First off, your mother’s firing is illegal now thanks to Democrats. My ma went through the same bs in the 70s and even when she was pregnant with me.
Secondly, you are correct that this was not the norm of employment and that we have reverted back to the historic mean. The sad thing is, the bubble of wages from 1945-1975 might now be looked back upon as the good times never to return. The way to recover that is to recreate Fordism by putting sound regulations in place, forcing greater ESOP and profit sharing between business persons and owners, and coming up with creative ways to expand labor. I would be even willing to back down on the minimum wage in exchange for greater rights to organize for labor and greater employee ownership via profit sharing and other methods.
Thirdly, higher education is overvalued and thus overinflated. I would love to support vigorous vocational and technical education, and there is a compelling case that we should stop subsidizing loans and private education and simply make public higher ed completely free. This is what Germany and most of Europe has done, and it has largely worked out.
Those that want PhDs and MFA’s and the like can pay out of pocket for them, those of us who long to read Plato in a gothic library can still pay out of pocket for that, but the majority of students that simply want some training and skills for a good paying job should be able to get them from technical and vocational colleges, some online coursework, and fully free state schools. Your BS’s or BBAs or BA’s in Accounting and Marketing can come from there. This is reverting back to Ed Brown’s tier of public colleges, using community and state colleges for the bulk of the coursework that the basic student needs to get a decent middle class job, and those that really want to read Plato under trees on a quad or go to a pre professional program can do so at universities and do so at cost. Ending collegiate athletics would also go a long way towards reducing costs and ensuring that students are there to learn, not to mention ending an unjust system of exploitation.
Fourthly, I completely reject the notion that unemployment is a state of mind or that people my age feel entitled to good education and good jobs. I have worked two jobs for the past two years, neither of which I liked, my fiancee doesn’t have a day off between her full time classes and her nursing program. Plenty of millenials are working just as hard, if not harder than their parents, to make their way through the milieu that is this economy. But there are not enough jobs that enable someone to support a family out there, and this is a bipartisan failure that requires a radical solution.
on Europe if you don’t score high enough on the admission test you can’t go. Even if you can get in many choose not to go. So demand appears not to be high. Unlikely that would happen here. Also the educational industrial complex is so huge here- imagine the layoffs when colleges started closing down.
American students have to score high on admissions tests as well.
The exploding student loan burden, together with the collapsing economy for graduating students in the US, strikes me as an enormous threat.
The economic forces driving the potential collapse of the US “educational industrial complex” are likely to be helped, not hurt, by making college education publicly, rather than privately, funded.
We face major risks in the education sector. Those risks are exacerbated, not mitigated, by the GOP dogma of “privatization”.
How private colleges suckered the government into that raw deal. It seems so much cheaper and affordable to create a U of C style classical liberal arts curriculm as the flapship program at every public university, and then leave the mechanical arts, technical and career training to community and state colleges (and I include doctors, engineers, accountants, etc. in that wide bearth). The medieval model that only teachers, professors, clergy, philosophers, politicians and lawyers need a liberal arts education seems to hold up to modern scrutiny.
Everything else is a mechanical or technical art that could be taught in 2-3 year programs devoted to just that. I think the students interested in becoming doctors, engineers, biochemists or accountants would appreciate that kind of focused curriculum without having to study Rousseau and pay all the credit hours reading him and Milton entail. And no American should attend an institution of higher education to play a sport, that just defies logic and is something condemned not just by nebbish U of C presidents but by US Presidents as well, including an athletic polymath named Teddy Roosevelt.
I have undergraduate degrees in “technical arts” as you put it. There’s more to mechanical engineering than statics, dynamics, fluids, and calculus. It turns out that, once employed, the ability to communicate is also important.
It also turns out that our society is better off when folks with technical skills aren’t isolated in their field, but rather are encouraged to be multidisciplinary.
In as much as it’s helpful for someone with a liberal arts degree to be able to correctly interpret a chart appearing in a newspaper, it’s helpful for someone with a technical degree to be able to interpret artistic and cultural aspects of our life.
You should have these communication and writing skills by the end of high school, along with a solid grounding in the basics of liberal arts, reading a newspaper, voting as a citizen, and appreciating art, film, and literature. I certainly did. My parents certainly did, and they never went on to college. I think the push to get everyone to go to college eroded some of the standards and foundations of what a high school education once provided.
My forty years in industry as an engineer, programmer, executive, and consultant has taught me that the technical and social aspects of virtually EVERY business issue are tightly intertwined in a fractal toffee of complexity.
This is true for pretty much all abstraction levels, from the most general (“how do I successfully replace a technology that my successful business depends on every day?”) to the most specific (“Who should have root/admin privileges on a scientist’s company-provided computer?”).
It is not possible to solve the technical aspects of an issue without also addressing the social aspects, and vice-versa. Social issues often show themselves as technology complaints, and technical issues often show themselves as social complaints.
I like to think I’ve spent my life learning about life. I was fortunate that a key aspect of my undergraduate work (I have a BSEE) was to teach me how to teach myself. I have spent FAR more time learning about the “liberal arts” than about technology.
My fantasy is that we will replace the industrial-age “factory” model of “school” as a factory that produces “educated” products with a far more organic model — I think of it as neo-agricultural. I would like “school” to be a network of resources, friends, colleagues, data, and ideas. A fertile medium, if you will, from which “education” emerges as a life-form.
Discussions with a friend of mine have led us to develop an outline for the kinds of curriculum we could start teaching. We feel that for the humanities and social studies, qualitative approaches involving socratic seminars, long and short papers, research papers, and the like would reveal far more than tests. There should be some testing for the aspects of those disciplines that require it (rules of grammar, dates and important persons, etc.), but mostly, the best way to prepare students for college is to start teaching like college. And teaching large classes how to take standardized tests are not how most colleges operate.
And for stomv and your observations, I did not mean to malign those with technical degrees or insist they can’t take a liberal arts curriculum. I am arguing we should have our elementary and secondary education be as broad and wide as a liberal arts college in terms of curriculum, expectations, and rigor and leave the career specialization to the collegiate level.
A family friend is enrolled in a two year college for welding since he wants to be a welder. Great job with a union and great benefits. No reason he needs a BA in Communications to be a welder.
A lot of other fields can go back to operating on an apprenticeship basis, and we could use this as an opportunity to unionize or reunionize some of these professions. But, the kind of ‘learning how to think/how to write’ disciplines I got in college he should be exposed to at the secondary level in high school. He should be able to write competent, be a thoughtfully engaged citizen, and understand basic mathematical and science concepts (both for practicality and to be a thoughtfully engaged citizen).
I am angered that public education is failing at being able to produce well rounded citizens, moves for charters and privatization seem to be taking public education in an even more market oriented direction rather than one focused on that critical mission. It will be difficult, as it was in healthcare, to nationalize a public program for 50 states with hundreds of rent seeking special interests at stake. But wholesale meaningful reform is worth a try-one that puts educators in the driver’s seat.
Almost everyone in the US can go to college if they want. Someone will take them no matter how stupid they are and they can get student loans to pay for it.
This is just wrong as well:
I won’t comment further because it’s so wrong.
Note nothing in this discussion has anything to do with privatization or the GOP. You should consider new bogeyman to break things up a bit.
It doesn’t sound as though you have very much first-hand experience with or familiarity with recent data about what is going on for today’s college students.
Do you have ANY awareness of how much more competitive college admission is today than it was even ten years ago? Do you have any idea of what current student loan burdens are today and what is happening to the economic futures of the young people who have them?
In my view, it is meaningless to discuss the “Academic-industrial complex” of today, or the issues that face college-age men and women today, without addressing the failed mythology/dogma of privatization and the rise of the GOP. The extreme right has been dominating this economy and government for three decades (since Reagan), and we are seeing the consequences.
Have you talked to anyone who works at Community Colleges? The students there are barely able to read. What about the for-profit colleges? Do you think they have any standards?
Wouldn’t that be for the best? Rather than socially promoting kids who can’t handle the courseload and saddling them with massive amounts of debt? Or getting barely literate linebackers to have Communications degrees? Not sure why that is a bad thing. A three tier system like the kind Edmund G Brown pioneered in California could provide a free education at the community college levels for anyone who wants to take courses, free or near free technical and work related collegiate education at the state college level, leaving a liberal arts education and preprofessional programs for those that test into it and are interested and motivated towards completing it.
If we subsidize and fund schools the right way, there would be little need for out of state students to dream about Michigan, Virginia, or Berkeley when UNH and UMASS are just as good and just as free. That’s the way to resolve this, and might as well nail the vampire of the NCAA with a wooden cross while we are at it.
Eliminating for profit colleges is also a good start. ‘Many choose not to go’ since university education there is really reserved for those that actually want to learn about the liberal arts. How someone who wants to be an accountant, a middle manager in a corporate office, wiork at an advertising agency, sell real estate, be a civil servant, work in fashion, be a parole officer or a police officer or a firefighter, etc. needs a BA is beyond me. I strongly agree that we can create an alternative program that is more specialized and more affordable for the vast majority of people who could care less about reciting the Melian dialogue in the original Greek.*
*And I met plenty of people who do at my dear alma mater, those are the folks we want to be teachers, lawyers, and professors. I strongly feel medical education can skip that phase since they are mechanics of the body, but they should still have the choice to take it if they wanted to.
We also believe that an informed citizenry is the foundation of our democracy. That means having a good understanding of history and the workings of government, empathizing with a range of human conditions through literature, anthropology, or sociology, understanding the thinking and creative impulses of the past through philosophy and art history, etc., the ability to understand and intelligently frame arguments, marshal evidence, and understand the rudiments of scientific knowledge and the scientific method. Admittedly, every high school graduate used to have this. I think your professional / vocational folks will need it too.
No reason they can’t have it again. We are doing the opposite at present, cutting liberal arts in high school and focusing on STEM at all costs. Cutting music, extra curriculars and art classes. I haven’t taken a photo class since high school, but you could put me in a dark room tomorrow and I would know what to do. I know how to block if you threw me into a play. Most of what I use in my daily job for court procedures I learned from high school mock trial.
Civics should be mandatory and a graduation requirement, along with taking at least one technical, one visual, and one performance art class. Our public schools should be the laboratories and foundations of our democracy, as John Dewey would argue, our universities should be where the leaders of democracy are forged. But the participants should be armed with all the tools they need without stepping foot in a college classroom.
…has made an associates degree irrelevant, if not a BA. I took both Latin and Russian in high school, for example.
Farmers used to read Cicero.
The academic-industrial complex has cheapened the high school diploma to the point where is counts for less than pre-school, but that is merely to ensure that profits in the form of additional tuition can be garnered.
The whole meme about how some schools are NON-PROFIT and free of the taint of privatization makes me laugh. Merely because there are no shareholders to answer to does not mean that they are not ruthlessly out to make a buck.
Nothing you say in that post is false. To the extent that the ‘non profit’ universities are operating more and more like for profit business seems to bolster my view that they should be taxed and regulated like a for profit business, that might be one way to pressure costs down quickly.
But I am exactly proposing that we go back to the days when farmers read Cicero, a classical language is required alongside a modern language, and the average high school graduate has a well rounded education in the arts and sciences, as well appreciation for the fine arts. If we could do it under Ike we can do it today. It will require making a lot of stakeholders unhappy.
High schools 50 years ago did not presume that 100% of their students would go on to college. In fact, many did not even presume that most of their students would even graduate. In 1952 the Herald published an article decrying the high dropout rate – 52% in “industrial cities” (which held most of the population). Students had to attend up until age 16.
This was more or less OK because an education was not necessary to participate in the economy. The article spoke of the trouble convincing a “successful businessman who went as far as the fourth grade” that an education was important. Imagine trying to find a job – or even start a business – today, with just a fourth-grade education? Impossible.
We have never stepped back and checked our assumptions. Is every student in every situation capable of a college degree? If not, yet we require this to participate in the economy, then our economy is horrendously broken. I suspect that is the case.
I don’t think this is a problem of “an academic-industrial complex”. I think this is a political and economic problem. We have moved many, many jobs to other countries in the name of saving a few dollars and trying to capture consumers in those markets as customers for our global corporations. These jobs were the ones that people with a fourth grade education could hold – jobs that once paid people enough to live a decent life. We completely eliminated manual labor as a life path, and we provided just one other path – get well-educated and get a “better” job. Many people could, and did rise to the challenge, but in doing this, standards had to be lowered because the education was now for the masses, not the culled group of people most likely to embrace it.
Why can’t retail cashier job have benefits and security? Having worked at a factory production job and a retail clerk, I can tell you first hand that both took a set of skills and neither was easier than the other. The only difference in my case was that one had a wage/benefit agreed to through collective bargaining and the other did not.
Not sure where you worked in a factory, but generally you get paid more for more difficult work and more dangerous conditions. I recently finished my factory career (non union) and I’m happily retired. I can think of a couple of dozen guys missing fingers, using canes, back problems, etc. Not as likely to happen in the retail world. I got up at 4 in the morning, put my instant coffee in the microwave, made my sandwich and took the money I saved not going to Starbucks and put it in the stock market. Disciplined use of a 401k can make anyone middle class.
…but everyone’s time is worth a certain amount no matter how menial the job. You should not be struggling to pay bills with ANY full time job, and if you are struggling you are certainly not investing, but spending every last penny. Your last line especially is either naive or arrogant. There is more to life than the almighty market.
But jobs at Mcdonalds were never designed to provide enough to raise a family. Entry level jobs introduced people to the workforce where they could expand their skills and then open their own diner, get their own food truck, etc. If their life long ambition was to work the fryolater the marketplace will not give them enough. If we raise the minimum wage to $15 for the counter person, how do you think the truck driver standing there ordering is going to take that? He’ll want $30. There is more to life than the market, but the use of investing provides the best opportunity for average person to prosper. When I buy a share of Berkshire-Hathaway, Warren Buffet works for me.
McDonalds is one of our nation’s largest private employers and your telling us that it’s not able to support a family? How does that work?
Why shouldn’t someone behind a counter be paid a wage that allows him to live? How have we come to the belief that people should have to work multiple jobs to survive?
I was driving by a public bus yesterday, and it occurred to me – how many people think that a bus driver should be a middle class worker? I bet that most people don’t think they should. But why not? Because “the market”? A global market where we’re competing with people who earn less than $1 per day?
Let’s play a game here’s 5 occupations and list them in order according to how you think they should be paid. Burger flipper, tree trimmer, bus driver, brain surgeon, airline pilot. Expand the list as you see fit based on responsibility for others, skills needed, etc.
In ascending order: burger flipper, bus driver, tree trimmer, airline pilot, brain surgeon PROVIDED THAT the burger flipper is making $15/hr. To add a couple of jobs whose compensation has always been objectionable teachers should make high 5-figures per annum and professional athletes should be brought down out of the stratosphere.
I think that Christopher has the order correct, and also the vital point that the lowest wage should be about $15/hour, because you simply can’t live on $8/hour. I totally get the point that as the minimum wage is increased, some jobs are not viable any more. I just can’t accept that as much of an argument against
We have plenty of wealth in this country to go around. No one is suggesting Communism and paying people the same wages. The US GDP is about $16 trillion per year. Spread that across 150 million workers and it comes to a staggering $106k per worker. That means the money is available to pay people a very good wage – it’s just that the distribution is screwed up. A high upper tax bracket (in effect, a wage ceiling) coupled with a higher minimum wage (a wage floor) would compress the range and more people would be able to live a good life. If the maximum annual earnings before hitting a 92% tax bracket was $3 million per year, this would not harm the US economy provided that we could restrict people from fleeing such a rate (I know, a bold assumption). No one is irreplaceable at $3 million per year. No one at that level is going to withhold their talents from the economy. Mitt Romney is going to continue to do what he does because he likes the thrill of it. Steve Jobs founded Apple when the tax rate was 70% – that didn’t stop him.
that tax rates that are too low on the wealthy can be as damaging as too high. Those that can cash in a make $75 mil a year have more focus on the short term and less of an incentive to insure the policies will generate long term growth and stability of the bank or business. They do not need to rely on the long term success for their own personal success or retirement. Like lottery winners they are not dependent on a continuing paycheck. They can display riskier behavior that can be damaging to long term economic well being of the company and the community.
Tell me this: McDonalds, in order to stay in business, needs workers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year at their location in Bellingham Massachusetts. (Yes, they never close) The same is true for many other such places. Christmas Tree Shops is advertising for overnight stock clerks to fill the shelves M-F 11PM-7AM.
Obviously high school children cannot supply this labor supply. These will have to be adult citizens and this will be their only occupation.
How are these individuals supposed to support themselves with shelter, food, medical care, transportation and save for retirement/emergencies?
…is through the hard work of those frontline minimum wage earners. As Abraham Lincoln pointed out capital is the fruit of labor. Any time CEO salaries are defended by those who object to wage increases I want to ask, “How successful would you be without those people on the front lines?”
…there are still bills to pay, food to buy, etc. Once that person does move up the minimum wage job will have to be filled by someone else, who likewise has to pay the bills. People in these situations are not investing and cannot do so.
Sure, if you’re a insider on Wall Street. The 401K, contrary to the hype, was never intended as a retirement tool for the masses.
In any case, it’s getting harder each year for most in the labor class to save.
I’m happy that you got lucky in the market. I’m not sure you realize just how different your prospects were as a 20-something starting your career in comparison to today’s 20-something. Please watch the Elizabeth Warren clip up-thread, she provides the facts that explain the differences.
Your suggestion that “Disciplined use of a 401k can make anyone middle class” is pure bunk, utterly unsupported by facts or reality.
I always thought of it as a strange satanic bargain where you end up even more dependent on Wall Street speculations.
“Oh… Corporation X is raping babies and blowing up mountains… but I gotta get my 11% yield.”
Newsflash: A job doesn’t have to suck. Here’s a timely item on just that. It’s about Equilibrium.
https://growthecon.wordpress.com/2015/01/05/job-quality-is-about-policies-not-technology/
Put away $1000 a year and if I’m around in 20 years I’ll check in with you. $20 bucks a week, 2-3 Starbucks, you won’t miss it.
I make $70 per diem substitute teaching, despite getting plenty of education, doing everything I’m supposed to, accumulating credentials such as Eagle Scout. Believe me, that was never the topic of what-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up essays. It’s technically a bit above minimum wage and I still get parental help. I DO NOT HAVE $20 a week to put away nor do I have Starbucks stops to sacrifice because I already can’t afford that. My life is already about as no-frills as you can get and yes, I have plenty of ambition beyond substitute teaching, but finding more gainful employment has eluded me. I like to call substituting “gainfully unemployed”.
It’s like social autism. ” Hey… everyone is just like me and if they aren’t, they should be.”
401k’s just hand your money mote over to speculators who can barely handle the flood of cash from everyone’s wretched plan. The equity and bond markets were once a place for institutional investors and small time dabblers.
Once that monstrosity was introduced, it made Wall Street crazy chasing ever riskier schemes to feed yield expectations.
Good jobs are about equilibrium. Costco and Market Basket are high equilibrium employers. They decided it is more valuable and profitable to have a stable motivated work force. It is like sustainable agriculture.
And in Market Basket’s case, that high equilibrium rescued the CEO in a very unusual labor action.
Walmart is a low equilibrium employer. It rips through employees and functions more like a slash and burn approach that has become popular with right wing ideologues and glibertarians, (same difference).
Equilibrium IS the basis of the job security many yearn for. And nothing supports equilibrium like a properly adjusted minimum wage.
Then there is the credential lottery. An altruistic person who seeks a lower paying teaching credential is somehow a loser when compared with the engineer who went for the fattest compensation credential at hand.
And then the latter lectures the former for not having sufficient avarice… nice. It’s the glibertarian essence.
Teachers only work half a year. The ones I knew had summer jobs, I was wondering what you planned to do. 2 painted houses and 1 was a roofer. Waiting tables on weekends, etc. And yes at times I did landscaping in addition to my factory job.
Also in my job game, where would you put a Harvard law professor? Would that job warren t being at the top of the pyramid?
Less Than teachers
Just as teachers work more than 8-3 M-F nine months of the year, NFL athletes work more than ~20 Sundays a year.
People love to criticize teachers by bringing up bogus claims of part time hours and how much time off they get, as if time spent on the job has to be the one and only measure of value.
It’s scot12mass who is incorrect. I would argue NFL players are underpaid considering how terrible their injuries are and what medical care a good third of them will require when they retire, but I think john was trying to argue the GOP lionizes football players and demonizes teachers, while one group arguably ‘works’ harder than the other, and we can all agree that the latter provides far more benefit to society than the former. But NFL players are workers too-it is the owners we should be aligned against.
The minimum pay for an NFL rookie is $420,00 with guaranteed increases for each year of experience. In four years of play they will earn well in excess of $2 million, more than most workers in earn in a lifetime in the US. Yes their work is brutal but if they demonstrate a modicum of thought they still have a nest egg bigger than most of us earn in a lifetime, along with the prospects of 35 years of future earnings. OTOH, I do acknowledge that most players learn squat in college and are not prepared for a future due to our collegiate sports-industrial complex.
Harvard profs max out at about 1-2mil a year, the average Fortune 500 CEO makes about 25 times that but you glorify him (and there’s a 98% chance it’s a white guy we are talking about) and condemn the professor and teacher who are at least giving back to society.
You might want to consult with her because she could tell you that working 9 months out of 12 is 3/4 rather than 1/2 the year:) When I suggest that teachers should make high five-figures and someone points out they have all that time off my retort is, “You’re right – which is why I’m not asking for six-figures!” Teachers should not need second jobs, whether during the summer or evenings and weekends. They are at least as important as doctors and lawyers to a well-run society and quite a bit more so than professional athletes. I would probably put Harvard professor between pilot and brain surgeon.
I think you are a little older than me but we are basically in the same boat. The fact that I want to be a teacher for the stability, union, and benefits in addition to the giving back component should tell you how terrible it is on the supposedly free and easy private sector path.
We just had a lawyer quit since she was fed up with the kind of work she is doing, and she has no idea what she wants to do, she now realizes it isn’t law, but she can’t waste that degree she is still paying off. My sister in law was in the same boat, so many confused people go to grad schools on false premises that it is their golden ticket to prosperity. So many more are going to college for the same reason.
Beef up what high school teaches, simplify what college and universities are supposed to do, and fund them equitably so that public institutions are as affordable as possible. And let’s create more good paying and secure jobs in the US. Cooperative ownership, easing unionization, and regulating corporate profits a bit better can do the trick, but the minimum wage is the first start.
Maybe I had it easier than kids today, and jobs such as the one I started on aren’t available. ( One of my first factory jobs was manually filling railroad cars with 100 lb sacks of processed sand, it was piecework so the faster you went the more you got paid). I would have loved to work in archaeology, but knew it wouldn’t put food on the table. If you can find a career you love, don’t worry about money, enjoy your bliss. Until a better way comes along (wage control?),the marketplace with all it’s imperfections will still control who makes what. Change society if you can but generally those who work harder (starting quarterback, first chair) are going to make more. Of all the things I’ve read here the glaring need for a class in “practical skills”in high school is readily apparent.
…is precisely what led to depression in the 30s, which is why today’s concentration is such a great cause of concern. Postwar, on the other hand, the marginal rates were higher and we could actually invest in the public good. While there were certainly rich and poor, there was also a stronger sense of the commonweal, noblisse obilge, and making the American dream a reality.
I hope so, but then, when the Republicans took over the House, they said the same thing, and the first things they did were guns and abortion. I’d love to see them address our economic issues, but history has shown that they are going to scratch their ideological itches raw first. Also, it depends how they define addressing jobs and the economy. For Democrats, it’s one thing, for Republicans it means cutting more business taxes, attacking social spending, and trickle down economics.
The goal is to look socially conservative while not actually moving the ball in that direction while simultaneously doing a lot to move the ball on an economically conservative direction. They didn’t play debt ceiling hostage taking over abortion, the real conservative ideology from Mike Lee to Susan Collins is an unregulated and unrestricted free market.
I think making social issues the litmus test of Republican extremism really blinds is to who the real enemy is and what the real goals of that opposition are. It also makes it way too easy for progressives to fall prey to scare tactics from Wall Street conservatives in our own ranks who toe the corporate line while taking on the religious right.
The entire state is not booming – take a drive outside of 495 and see how bad things can be. There are neighborhoods in this state which would shock you.
The “94% of us have jobs” is a false number. Look more closely at the Labor Force Participation Rate. In Springfield, that number is about 54% when it should be closer to about 71% (which is the rate in cities closer to Boston). That translates to a void of about 15,000 jobs in the city of Springfield itself. When you add in immediately surrounding cities, that is a void of another 5-7,000 jobs.
Don’t overlook the massive deindustrialization that has taken place over the past 30 years. People who were formerly employed at middle-class wage jobs are now employed in the service sector at a fraction of their salary. Between 2000 and 2012, Springfield’s Median Family Income dropped by 18% – from $50,001 to $40,534.
Now I know that the people who are not participating in the labor force are generally not voting, so it’s easy to ignore them, but please don’t presume that the entire state is generally doing OK – it is not.
Yes, I know. But it’s the number that the media and the elected folks use. It’s like “The DOW” and “GDP”. These numbers are important to the wealthy people (the rentier class) and don’t mean as much to guys like me. I’ve lived the life you are describing. Right out of high school in 1973, I walked into a job at Xerox that (adjusted for inflation) paid $45K a year and full benefits. Poor timing on my part I guess as most economists call 1973 the beginning of the end for the growing middle class. It’s been a tough haul ever since.
Yes indeed, the entire state and the entire nation is not booming, but if your running on “Jobs and the Economy” you can say it is with a straight face. That’s why we need to stop campaigning on it.
Republicans are using JOBS as a reason for the KXL bill, which will likely be the first thing passed by the new congress.
I understood the KXL pipeline to be under the auspices of the State Dept. John Kerry has done a great job of positioning climate change as a threat to national security. He gets it. So why hasn’t he just stopped this project?
the Dems are asserting they have enough votes to sustain a veto. Will Obama veto? TBD…
It won’t create jobs, it is no longer economically viable which even it’s backers concede, and with gas at 1.77 out here in Illinois and 2.39 last week when I was driving my folks around Wakefield, it seems even less necessary from any economic point. And the environmental risks are far too high.
Why should American water, American homes, and American land be threatened to export Canadian oil to foreign markets? That is the question we should be constantly asking.
The whole reason why the oil companies want it is so they can export shale oil rather than selling it locally. The shale oil boom is depressing fuel prices in the middle of the country because there is insufficient capacity to export it.
The “economy” as a term is pretty much devoid of meaning. I always get annoyed when it’s used as a “priority” in polling because it is an abstraction. Are we talking about job security? Economic security? Employment (with good jobs)? Affordability of goods?
And because it is not disaggregated as such, politicians treat “GDP” or the “Dow” as the markers of the “economy.” As though everyone benefited.
I wrote on this the other on the Daily Kos in a piece called “The 16 Million Children Living in Poverty Must Be Really Excited About the News about the Dow.”