Our country is struggling to find a way out of overlapping economic crises. One is cyclical: an agonizingly slow, jobless recovery from a recession made worse by a financial crash. The other crisis is structural. Our economy suffers from a dearth of capital investment and innovation, mismatches between workers’ skills and available jobs, and unsustainable budget and trade deficits.
Even before the recession struck late in 2007, the Great American job machine was sputtering. According to a recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute, “Between 2000 and 2007, the United States posted a weaker record of job creation than during any decade since the Great Depression.” Not only are good jobs vanishing, wages have been falling for all but the top U.S. earners.
One explanation for America’s ebbing dynamism is a long pause in innovation. Since 2000, technological advances have stalled, outside of the dynamic communications industry. In particular, tighter regulation—for good or for bad—appears to be slowing innovation in the healthcare sector.
Research from the Kauffman Foundation also points to a loss of entrepreneurial verve. The number of business start ups, which Kauffman says generate most of U.S. net job growth, has plummeted by about a quarter since 2006.
If there’s a bright spot in the U.S. economy, it’s the recovery of corporate profits and stock prices since 2009. Yet these developments also highlight a stark inequity: Returns on capital are up, but returns on labor are down.
The U.S. economy seems to have arrived at an inflection point. As the Obama administration puzzles over how to rekindle growth, one thing should be clear: There can be no going back to the old economic model of debt-fueled consumption, where U.S. households borrowed to maintain their living standards, aided and abetted by government deficits.
I was amused when reading this article because it fails to address the real issues as to the lack of jobs for the undereducated / unskilled workers. This society cannot continue to absorb the products of single parents producing offspring at the past and present rates.
There is a dearth of workers with simple skills as reading a ruler, particularly when it involves fractions. Most of the skill trades reside with the trade unions where entry is mostly handed to relations of members. Just count the dark faces in any building trades’ gathering for example, and the number of minorities has barely changed over the years.
Perhaps this society should encourage trade schools for the less educated where many high pay jobs do exist, particularly in right to work states. This might encourage minorities to aspire to become something other than professional athletes, musicians, pushers or whatever.
[...] Labor and the Producer Society, by Will Marshall [...]
Mr. Basich, those children, those so-called “products of single parents, are the children that over 13 million FATHERS abandoned for parts of, or their entire, childhoods.
Current UNPAID child support totals $110.3 BILLION for 2010, and states play games with the figures to make them look better than they are.
We have TENS of MILLIONS of SKILLED AND EDUCATED workers who can’t find jobs. Employers have found a new way to discriminate in hiring practices – pass over those who are long-term unemployed. And there’s a lot of discrimination AGAINST kids from single parent families in schools, the communities, and among businesses.
Social policies pertaining to DIVORCED single mothers and the children whose fathers abandoned them are inadequate; the agencies incompetent. Those fathers LIE to the courts, their kids, their families, their new wives, their employers, everyone around them, in order to dodge their financial responsibilities.
The jobs problem is not because children grow up in single parent homes. The job problem is the direct result of American corporations hoarding at least $2 TRILLION offshore, corporations which dodge their legitimate tax responsibilities to this country, the banks that support them, the financial structures which allow them to operate as they do, and decades of deregulation which led to such theft mechanisms as CDOs and CSOs.
Without loans for developers to undertake construction, there are no trades jobs. Nine million more houses are expected to be foreclosed on.
TRADES? Try TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION.
Your assertion is utterly specious.
[...] Read the rest by clicking here to find out how. Read Marshall’s full policy briefing on the subject by clicking here. [...]