What the biggest employment problem in the economy?

The problem with the economy comes from the outright purchase of the US government by the wealthy. It is what is known as third world syndrome. The government stops representing the people or even the best interest of the country as a whole and concentrates all of its efforts on helping the wealthy exploit every possible avenue for their personal enrichment.

People naturally do the bidding of the people who pay them, but the American citizens are no longer in control of paying the Government officials. The wealthy hand the elected officials millions of dollars which keep the officials in their cushy jobs of power and privilege. In return the politicians sell out the people of the United States and then lie through their teeth about it.

Until the umbilical cord between the wealthy and the pockets of the Government officials is cut, the American people will continue to loose wealth until they become as Thomas Jefferson said " homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered".

 

It is true that you cannot fix stupid. Yes changing a few percent in the tax laws upset the entire apple cart and instantly redistributed all the countries wealth. Well at least it sounds good to idiot liberals who cannot understand how an economy really works.

 

Capitalism will always tend towards market concentration. This reflects a myriad of reasons: from the inefficient (i.e. rent seeking behaviour) to the efficient (e.g. diversification encouraged by the flexible nature of knowledge). That market concentration, however, will always threaten the individual economic agent. Government then is not the cause of the problem. Instead, its the wrong form of Government which leads to a libertine attitude over corporate dominance. For example, a social democracy will naturally put a break on the negative effects of market concentration. In contrast, the US 'Anglo-Saxon' system encourages two structural flaws which negatively impacts on employment generation:

(1) US's neo-liberalism (where 'free market economics' is used to foolishly translate corporate rents as a positive phenomenon) ironically reduces the importance of the individual. Thus, as the economy lurches from crisis to crisis it is typically the small businessman that is crushed. This demolishes any opportunity of supply-side policies from engineering positive macroeconomic result.

(2) Labour market flexibility enables greater profit from the 'secondary sector' (i.e. bad jobs with low wages and poor job security perspectives). This encourages a low skilled equilibrium where inequalities are intensified by an economy devoid of sufficient upskilling. Its then a focus on the creation of these bad jobs that necessarily reproduces social ills with high working poverty and low inter-generational mobility.

 

Why would you characterize what we have as capitalism? It is not. What we have is fascist monopolistic economy in which the mega multinational corporations micromanage the economy by purchasing the governments on Federal and State level in order to control laws, policies, and regulations to benefit themselves at the expense of the American Citizens.

The vast majority of the laws and regulations pertaining to the economy and trade are not only influenced by the oligarchs, they are written by them and then given to their puppet government operatives to present on the floors of their legislative bodies as their own.

Until the legal bribery of government is stopped, America will continue its decent into a third world fascist state.

 

Because it is. Government has always played a dominant role in capitalism. Laissez faire, in contrast, is a myth. Indeed, it wouldn't be desirable as- given market concentration- capitalism is always prone to economic crisis.

The use of the term fascist is typically an abuse of political economy. Further, monopolistic is used to merely refer to product branding.

Will Anglo-Saxon capitalism always be prone to the blurring of private and public sectors? Of course. However, you've mixed up cause and effect. The blurring reflects the impact of 'free market economics' (i.e. a neo-liberalism framework which encourages rent seeking behaviour).

All a little conspiracy theorist for my liking. Take something like the minimum wage. This has certainly been supported by 'big business'. The conspiracy theorist would suggest its about eliminating threat from SMEs who cannot afford the higher wage. In reality, its just a correction for the inefficiency created by monopsony power.

Why focus on government rather than the real problem? Extreme inequality of resources such that individualism is largely a myth.

 

What if the only level of work they can do is bolting this part to that part, and is not overly able to do much more you have a man who was earning $24/hr job with a $10/hr job maybe with a family to support? Of course they will want a job near that in pay he can do.

 

On the Golden Gate bridge they have now removed the human ticket/money handlers. The newspaper said their average wage was $55K plus benefits. These were not educated and/or highly trained workers. The problems arose when these workers tried to re-enter the workplace, with little education and low skills, but demanding $55K plus benefits. We can guess the Golden Gate Bridge District paid generous wages along with union demands grossly overpaying these workers when based on their skills and education. What business will hire workers with little education and low skills paying them $55K plus benefits...answer; No one!

Is this the fault of the GG bridge who terminated their employment?
Is this the fault of union demands?
Is it the fault of the worker who did not learn new skills and/or acquire education?

The same scenario applies to many types of jobs and I dare say many of them involve the unions. What about our people in the military?

As of 2010, a Congressional Budget Office report estimated that the average active duty soldier receives an average $99,000 per year in compensation that includes pay and benefits, with 60 percent of the total being non-cash compensation. As an example, the Army website broke down the annual $29,380 compensation of a military police sergeant into $29,380 for salary, $16,164 for housing, $3,900 for food allowances, $1,800 for special pay, and tax advantages of $2,716. An example of tax savings are the allowances for food and housing, which are typically exempt from both federal and states taxes.

Depending on their private sector workplace skills and education, can they expect to find employment after the military which provides $99K per year in compensation, or even the $30K in actual cash wages?

Lastly, every person possess' a level of education and skills and will receive compensation based on this skill set...unless they are lucky to be in situations which 'temporarily' are paying higher wages. Each worker is competing with other workers for the limited jobs available and those qualifications seldom are based on someone earning $55K in cash wages plus benefits. It's the skills and education along with historical workplace performance which mostly determines which jobs we will obtain. If we were earning twice what our skill set deserves, and we lose that job, we cannot expect to find another job with the same compensation...

 

That suggests supply-side aspects dominate. They don't. For example, investment in education in the western world has just led to increased underemployment. Indeed, in some countries, it has reduced social mobility (due to continued inequality of opportunity)

 

If every worker was only paid what they were actually worth, I think you would see a lot of the decent jobs disappear.
Would this be a good thing? Hard to tell. That money might be able to put people to work for more efficient uses. Or it might not.

Certainly I think we can agree it's not the most ideal thing, theoretically, if we were to design an optimal economic system. But what are the alternatives?
I support decent paying jobs. The question is whether those decent paying jobs would still be there (though perhaps just in a different form) if the government chose to pay its workers the prevailing market wage instead.

 

But that value keeps diminishing, that's what you don't understand. Median wages have dropped to about half their worth over the last 25 years. If the average household keeps bringing in 50k for the next 15-20 years they will be inflated into poverty. This Is the issue people keep missing on income inequality. It's not that some billionaire makes billions of dollars, it's that the overall wealth of the country has increased immensely but the common man's buying power has diminished. And contrary to what you think, there absolutely is an overall pie, not just some individual pie nonsense. If we were to say supply side economics is the be all end all (which it's not, it's only half the equation) then the common working man's wealth is a direct result of the country's wealth enabling his employment. So if rich people get richer, then the common worker should theoretically be able to tap into more opportunities to have a share. Unfortunately that's not the case. We have a seriously broken economy. That's why you see college grads without gainful employment. So much has been outsourced and the bulk of our economy just doesn't pay decently.

 

E. None of the above.

Here is my list:

1. govt deficit spending & manipulation of the currency, causing the economy to shift from production to money shuffling.. trading, speculation, etc.
2. Govt based manipulations of the markets, favoring some businesses & sectors, & punishing others. Instead of creating a level playing field, they attempt to micromanage the economy & market forces.

These are the root causes of the employment problems. More mandates only worsens the problem. Govt cannot make a nation prosperous, but they can run it into the ground.

It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best law, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws. ~Theodore Roosevelt

 

A lack of competition for labor between the public sector and the private sector.

 

The biggest problem in the free economy today is overreaching government regulation and escalating cost (caused by government over-intrusion into the private market), also union influence that causes employers to assume 2.7 times the base salary for a managed employee even if they are not union employees. In addition, the U.S. has the highest corporate tax in the free world and environmental regulations that are adverse to manufacturing and business.

The current administration is openly adverse to capitalism. Government cannot, and will never be beneficial to the economy. All it can do is limit productivity. The proper position of government is to lightly regulate by already established laws that prohibit outright crime.

Almost forgot, the stupid, silly notion that petroleum is somehow 'evil' so we can't drill for much more OR even be able to increase our ability to refine it while being forced to buy it from our enemies who can turn the spigot on or off while so called 'green' technology keeps promising some miracle alternate fuel/energy that hasn't materialized in many decades, is not only ignorant but dangerous and naturally economy-killing.

 

The right still hasn't been able to come up with better solutions at lower cost; repeal is just useless as a political gambit.

 

The 'right' hasn't been the majority....yet.

 

they don't have better solutions at lower cost; repeal is just useless as a political gambit.

 

Yeah, you said that...repetition does not somehow make fact.

 

still no better solution sets at lower cost; just claiming repetition does not make a (moral) fact.

 

I'm really disappointed this thread has gone so off-topic.

What I wanted to discuss was which one is a bigger issue, wages being too low, or whether it is more a lack of good jobs.

Obviously a low demand relative to the supply of labor leads to both these issues. But in good economic times, do people basically still have the same type of jobs, they just earn more? Or is unemployment so high they have to take worse jobs? That is really the question I wanted to pose.

 

Yet, you completely dismissed an actual solution. Simply reserving labor at the rock bottom cost of a form of minimum wage on an at-will basis to lower that regulatory burden on the private sector while ensuring full employment of resources in the market for labor under our form of capitalism could accomplish an end to wage slavery and capitalism's natural rate of unemployment by merely using socialism to bailout capitalism like usual.

 

Although may be not directly related to this topic, but one thing which i have observed and listened a lot is that there are place under staffed and sometime employer is trying to get as much as possible out of the staff. So i feel if reasonable work hours and work loads are observed quite a few jobs will emerge. But it can eat into corporation's profit margins which they like to keep as high as possible.

Just my 2 cents

 

Do employers actually like it when Labor lies to them and let's them miss their turn simply because they are not really really that serious about a really really serious (employment) relationship?

Why not simply pay some labor to not feel any need to commit any form of fraud regarding being really really serious about an (employment) relationship, at the rock bottom cost of a form of minimum wage; that way, some labor who may be more motivated to compete to command a prevailing market based wage in our markets for labor would be more likely to be the ones seeking employment and providing the most efficiency.

 

Yes, that definitely happened during the recession. It was one of the cascading effects of employers laying off workers. When so many workers were losing their jobs, the workers who were still working became more desperate to keep their jobs, because they knew they might not be able to find another one. This allowed employers to be able to extract more work out of them, which in turn probably led to additional workers being laid off, because employers were able to get more "productivity" out of each worker.

Your wording is confusing and difficult to understand. Do you mean the government should pay them? And then employers would not have to pay them a higher wage (at least not directly) ?

I was trying to understand and characterize the symptoms, not discuss the underlying problems in this thread, though I suppose that was inevitable. Yes, obviously there is a lack of demand, relative to supply, for labor, but what type of lack of demand? The type of lacking demand that results in lower wages, or the type of lacking of demand for highly skilled upper position work? Yeah, there will always be jobs for people willing to work hard doing unpleasant tasks for minimum pay, but in good times there are much fewer people willing to do that.

 

Why not simply reserve labor at the rock bottom cost of a form of minimum wage that is socialized, not privatized, to lower that regulatory burden and cost to the private sector?

 

That might indeed be the most optimal thing to do, but the money still has to come from somewhere. Would a minimum wage burden be worse than a taxation burden?
You might have a talk with some of the members here who support a land value tax.