One Way To Bring Back Jobs
Posters suggested a topic on jobs and the economy. “There is not much demand for non skilled American labor from either end of the market - from the employer’s end or from the employee’s end. For example, American kids don’t want to mow lawns, don’t want to deliver papers as they used to do in the past. So employers look elsewhere, they look to adult immigrant labor.”
“So American kids don’t get to experience the association between earning a dollar and spending the dollar they just earned, meaning they don’t learn the value of money. Nor do they learn the value of work. And what values they learn or don’t learn as kids are the values they take with them as they enter adulthood.”
A reply, “I’m certainly not going to defend any lazy teenagers, but you act like they don’t want to when in fact there is no opportunity. Next time you go to Starbucks/Target/Any basic retail store, count who is over 45 and who is under 25. That young person may have wanted to go to school, but without even a low paying retail job he/she can’t afford to start taking classes or buy textbooks. Whats stopping them? The older adults.”
Another said, “In my small rural community job opportunities are rife for those who can tear themselves away from their video gaming or couch potatoery. I can’t imagine suburban communities are ALL that much different.”
“For example: I would LOVE to find a decent seamstress, cobbler, pet-feeder, garbage-bag-to-the-dump-hauler, supply-fetcher, paint-scraper, water seal applicator, weed-puller, ammo-reloader, small motor repairer, blanket/rug launderer, gamebird smoker, fence-repairer, swamp cooler conditioner, baseboard and tile grout scrubber, firewood chopper, etc., to help me out.”
“Somewhere along the line this ethic disappeared as it became fashionable among the middle classes to employ immigrant labor instead of one’s offspring. Surprisingly to some, this practice was not so rife in the upper (and, obviously, the lower) socioeconomic strata, but seemed to be concentrated more in the aspiring trade and merchant classes. As it spread, it backfired.”
And finally, “One way to bring back unskilled and semi-skilled jobs is for the American worker to be more competitive. One way to make them more competitive is to reduce the American worker’s cost of housing. One way to reduce the American worker’s cost of housing is to let house prices collapse.”
From MarketWatch. “A lot of people say they are deeply puzzled by the slow recovery in the U.S. economy. They look at the 9+% unemployment rate and the mediocre growth in national output, and they scratch their heads and wonder: Where is the boom that inevitably follows a deep bust, such as we experienced in 2008 and 2009?”
“There are a hundred different ways of looking at the economy, and a million different statistics. But if you wanted to focus on just one number that explains why the economy can’t really recover, this is the one: $7.38 trillion. That’s the amount of wealth that’s been lost from the bursting of housing bubble, according to the Federal Reserve’s comprehensive Flow of Funds report.”
“I don’t think we’ve quite grasped how much the bubble distorted the economy in the Oughts, and how much it continues to distort it today. We’re still paying the bills from that binge. The debt-to-disposable income ratio has slipped from 130% at the height of the bubble to 115%, but that’s still far more than the 90% recorded in 2000 or the 80% of 1989 or the 60% of 1976.”
“The slow growth in the economy is no mystery: Most families don’t have any extra money to spend. It will take a long time for the middle class to rebuild its wealth, especially if we don’t find some work. The crazy thing is that our leaders aren’t even talking about this crisis.”
A post from The Mysterious Flying Miser, July 20th, 2009. “It wasn’t long ago that most Thought Leaders were publicly denying the existence of a housing bubble, perhaps even unkindly. Now past the denial phase, many have skipped the mea culpa and jumped directly into bargaining phase. Below is a list of delightful ideas being seriously considered by People Who Know. Can you tell which thing is not like the others?”
1. “Today, we look at a serious proposal for cutting the time to healing for at least one of those bubbles (housing), and at least keep the other (credit) from getting worse. This is the most serious idea I have seen that could actually make a realpositive (sic) contribution to the economy and help put us back on a growth path. (Recently), the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by my friend Gary Shilling and Richard LeFrak. They offer a simple solution for the housing crisis: give foreigners who will come to the US and buy a home resident status (green cards).”
2. “In (our) paper, we propose a plan that will help reduce the costs from foreclosure by, in effect, giving the homeowner the option to force a renegotiation on the owner or owners of the loan….The homeowner ends up with positive equity in his house, so that he will either maintain the house or sell it outside foreclosure, and the creditor ends up with a claim of greater value than the foreclosure price of the house…The plan is premised on the assumption that widespread negative equity mortgages, as a consequence of the popping of the housing bubble, are the chief cause of the crisis, rather than loss of income caused by the recession, which the plan does not address.”
3. “In his new white paper, Dr. Mark Dotzour, the chief economist for the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University offers a … solution to fixing the housing crisis, one that involves more than simply devising ways to keep people in their homes. ‘We need to lower the depreciation schedule for investors who buy troubled houses to around five to seven years,’ he said. ‘And if we really want to solve the problem quickly, offer these investors 0 percent capital gains tax if they hold the properties for more than five years.’”
4. “The government simply needs to crank up the printing press and buy every U.S. Treasury bond it can get its hands on.”
5. “Amazingly, (the housing mess can be solved) with just one policy: a decree that whenever a bank forecloses on a home, the current occupant has the right to remain in the property indefinitely, simply by paying the fair-market rent.”
6. “And then there is this from Ben Jones. “What most people see as the problem, I see as the solution. What’s going to to help Las Vegas and Arizona…the reason that it grew for years (was) that there was cheap land. You could get a house for $100,000. When we get back to that, Arizona will heal.’”
“The biggest challenge we face is…we have to get back to an economy based on something other than buying and sellling each other houses…and taking out loans and spending them on cars and vacations.”
