A bit of anecdote here. A former college of mine traveled to Chihuahua Mexico where a US auto parts manufacture had set up a factory to make steering wheels. He was there to install equipment we had sold to them via their offices in Massachusetts. Here’s what he saw. A woman was operating a highly technical machine that manufactured the air bags. Another was expertly sewing the leather upholstery to the steering wheels. Others were wiring the harnesses that would connect all the controls from the steering wheels to the cars various duties. Do any of these sound like low skilled jobs? To me, they sound very similar to the ones I saw back in 1973 when I was an inventory supply clerk on an assembly line at Xerox where we built the Model 4000 copier. It was the “entry level” job that I got after graduating from high school with a C+ average. Adjusted for inflation, I was paid about $45K a year, plus health care and two weeks vacation. Actually, if I worked the line as an assembler instead of just supplying it, I would have made a lot more.
So how much did the people in Mexico make? About $8.00 Per Day. I guess $8.00 a day is better than the national average of $5.00 a day. And then there is the issue of job safety. The .1% in the USA complains about too many job killing regulations. Here’s what happens after safety regulations are lost.
And what about this?
Take the poll at the end of the article and see that almost half of those participating would not spend a dime more to buy USA, so much for the “invisible hand” that Adam Smith wrote about….
It’s a question of creating new jobs for our changing economy and doing more to expand the safety net. Neither is discussing basic income, which most economists think are the only way to mitigate against automation. Drivers will soon be replaced by automation and 3-D printing will replace many large scale assembly lines. The rising global middle class as you pointed out is actually making manufacturing in the US affordable again, but while “Made in the USA” is coming back, it’s not doing so at a scale that would employ the people it did during the mid century heyday.
I’ve seen no mainstream politician endorse UBI or infrastructure jobs programs. We could rebuild and build it a large scale rail network, alternative energy networks, and a post-carbon economy that creates more jobs. Maybe we need to shift to a 30 hour week while we drive more and more students with your GPA to community college where they can be trained to be workers rather than “learn how to think”. Liberal arts educations should increasingly taught at the high school level to produce well rounded global citizens while colleges take on a more vocational role.
No one is really thinking out the long term and proposing ways to address it. Not to mention zoning reform and building up and out with denser housing. This is the kind of realistic platform a progressive party ought to have, paired with higher wages and worker protections. But you aren’t being in the Eisenhower years back, no candidate who promises that can deliver on that kind of promise.
I agree with all that you have written. Here we are with a self-proclaimed business genius and a self-proclaimed political master and neither one is even suggesting that the “jobs and economy” solutions they are promoting are just smoke & mirrors. Once elected, how long before people realize that it’s another flat line on the economic EKG for most Americans and how much longer can they hold out that next year, things will be different?
How long before the people in “fly over country” look at Washington D.C. in the same way that ordinary Brits looked at Brussels?
NOBODY is going to “bring back the jobs”. We’ve spent the last fifty years killing them with automation.
What we need to do is claw back the wealth from those who own the companies who own the intellectual property (and therefore get virtually ALL the wealth) and distribute that wealth using some sort of guaranteed income.
We will NEVER AGAIN see the kind of “full employment” we had in the 1950s and 1960s. It just isn’t going to happen.
so the post in general is wrong in viewing this. If anything we know job growth comes from innovation and new companies. Small businesses play a factor as well. So we invest in infrastructure and we have a pretty good idea about the role of green energy in our future so that’s a good start. We should continue to push for investment in growth areas to grow our economy.
…but I would caution against comparisons to Brussels, which many do not see as “their” national capital but rather simply the HQ for a faceless international bureaucracy.
…but also a bit utopian. How in the world do you pay for that, especially without ginning up the makers vs. takers arguments? Besides, I think psycologically people like to work, to contribute. We need jobs that have to stay here. Infrastructure is certainly one category, but there are all sorts of professional pursuits that colleges will still be needed for. If anything it is what I think of as vocations that would need college yes. As for your idea of zoning reform, count me out. Denser housing does not sound like progress to me!
The premise that we can achieve anything like full employment with “all sorts of professional pursuits that colleges will still be needed for” is, in fact, utopian.
We must tax the wealthy and very wealthy, so that we can return that concentrated wealth to the masses. At the end of the day, there is no other way.
Well said. The idea that we will all be well paid college educated professionals is beyond Utopian thinking, it’s delusional. Just for kicks some busy day, count the number of working people we all count on; people whose job does not even come close to requiring a college degree: Grab a coffee at the drive through, fill your tank with gas, pick up a burger at the diner near work, call to see if your dog’s grooming appointment is today, pick up your dry cleaning on the way home after hitting the grocery store for a few extras, hope that your package from Amazon has arrived at your doorstep, notice that your lawn was mowed while you were away, call for an estimate on getting a new roof installed, and then call the golf course to set a tee time for the weekend…..and tell me that all of the people you came in contact with are “high school kids looking for pocket money” or “entry level workers who will be promoted to a better paying job in the near future.” ……
…by both johntmay and somervilletom. I did not mean to suggest that the professional jobs requiring a college education would or should be the only jobs that remain. I also just discovered a typo in my previous comment that probably didn’t help. The third to last sentence should read, “If anything it is what I think of as vocations that would need college LESS.”
Mincome was a fantastic anti-poverty program, the carbon rebates in Vancouver and the Alaska Fund rebates have also been substantially proven to reduce poverty, improve household stability, etc. It has one of the lowest poverty rates and income inequality rates in the country.
Matt Bruenig and his wife Elizabeth made a compelling argument in the Atlantic a few years ago. Charles Murray, a center right economist, would consolidate social welfare into a single check for every American. He has recently made the cutoff 30% above the poverty line, so its not a true UBI but a near UBI. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a great book on the subject. Had liberals like Senator Gore and Humphrey not opposed it for being not generous enough, it likely would’ve eliminated childhood poverty and expanded opportunity for working mothers substantially. Give Directly has substantially better outcomes than traditional foreign aid programs.
Martin Luther King, Walter Reuther, Dorothy Day, and Georgists on the left and Murray Rothbard, Hayek, and Friedmen from the libertarian right all liked the idea. It’s an authentic third way policy. Everyone is covered by the government and poverty is eliminated, but the individual can determine how to spend their money. No more SNAP, SSI, WIC or EBT telling you what to do and humiliating you with drug tests and draconian byzantine regulations. And it’s substantially cheaper and more effective. It’s a lot less utopian than rebuilding the 1950s via Eisenhower tax rates, unionization, or tariffs and immigration quotas.
Growth areas she should think about:
– The care and feeding of all those baby boomers
– Healthcare (see above, plus a lot of innovation to get us beyond the current model — home diagnostics for example)
– Alternatives to cars
– Space travel?
– Tourism
– Gun control technology*
*Wishful thinking.
…Grab a coffee at the drive through, fill your tank with gas, pick up a burger at the diner near work, call to see if your dog’s grooming appointment is today, pick up your dry cleaning on the way home after hitting the grocery store for a few extras, hope that your package from Amazon has arrived at your doorstep, notice that your lawn was mowed while you were away, call for an estimate on getting a new roof installed, and then call the golf course to set a tee time for the weekend…
Or do all these job vanish?
n/t
I think you could require that any federally procured firearms be a smart gun and drive the costs down considerably. Also get some big name hunters and shooters to embrace it (Tom Selleck maybe?). It’s certainly a better way to reduce gun violence than a fucking no fly list.