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.”
‘I don’t think we’ve quite grasped how much the bubble distorted the economy…and how much it continues to distort it today’
IMO, every day and every dollar spent fighting the correction of these distortions is wasted. And we’ve wasted a lot of days and dollars in the past few years.
So what happens in the case where we remove interventions?
IMO the economy completely collapses in a manner similar to Greece, Argentina and the USSR. I really do not think we are close to being there, but we would have to devalue our economy to scale our debt (national, municipal, individual and business) in effect defaulting on a large percentage.
The advantage of this kind of default is that we can control the rate of descent and the landing to some degree without having the whole country break up like the USSR did.
As far as fighting things like home prices with policy we could fight by getting money (a LOT of money) into the hands of small businesses and individuals. I am talking scale here not a trillion or two but on the order of $20 trillion. Home prices could remain high and no one would be under water. We could stop the credit score plunge, shore up our pensions and importantly Social Security.
How could this be accomplished?
Simple replace every at risk dam, bridge and structure in the US. Upgrade our infrastructure (water, sewer, power) Put solar panels on the roof of every building and home in the US. Build a Moon-base, Fund NASA to the hilt, hiring hundreds of thousands of engineers and scientists.
How could this be done? Simple print the darn money and pay people with it (NO BORROWING). At the end of the day we would have a massive INVESTMENT in our country and its future and millions of solvent American Citizens. Foreclosures would no longer be an issue.
Inflationary? YUP! What is the alternative?
Inflationary? YUP! What is the alternative?
2. Give it all the 1%ers and hope.
3. Let it crash and see how ugly it really gets.
Your solution 1 seems logical enough, but any attempt at it will probably morph right back into 2, which is the path we seem determined to follow.
If printing works then why can’t every country in the world print to prosperity. We would never have a recession and we could all live in Shangri-La with blue skies and happy days. Will the Zimbabwe greenbacks have any value?
What is the alternative?
Perhaps stop meddling and let the markets heal itself. We will have winners and losers. The way nature and capitalism is suppose to works. I think we will come out stronger and sooner.
American politicians and the ptb are afraid of failure. imho
Globalization will skews “the markets” to lower the American standard of living to be on the level of some average between what Amerians have now, and the rest of the world. My guess is that the weighted world average is somewhere between Mexico and rural Thailand.
The ideal globalization would be for everyone in the world to live in the equivalent of the American 1950’s, but there is too much population and not enough natural resources for that.
As it stands there is insufficient money in circulation to continue paying Social Security and Medicare, let alone our military and Obamacare.
We stand to default on some $60,000,000,000,000 worth of debt in the next few years. This INCLUDES Social Security, Medicare and most pensions municipal and private. This happened in the Soviet Union and it can and will happen here if we kick back and continue our path of inaction.
I am certain this is far far more severe than a Soviet, Argentinean or Greek style default and would at a minimum push our world into a dark ages and at worst full blown nuclear war.
We can print our way out of this mess, because the money was already loaned into existence and spent and most importantly is in US dollars. The idea is to neutralize debt, not put big screen TV’s in every home.
Because I truly believe things are going to get really bad in the northern hemisphere, the south island of New Zealand looks like a decent place to ride out the coming storm.
Can any of you demonstrate to me in simple math how all this debt gets paid if we do not increase the money supply to create enough flow to cover it?
the south island of New Zealand looks like a decent place to ride out the coming storm.
Aaah now that is my favorite place in the whole wide world. I am thinking about living in the vicinity of Mt Cook and watch Cricket matches in Christ church all the while eating quiches. Another plan is to move to Queenstown NZ but it gets oriental based tourism traps. What is there to do in the South Island besides farm sheep, elk, or deer?
Can any of you demonstrate to me in simple math how all this debt gets paid if we do not increase the money supply to create enough flow to cover it?
Honest question…why is inflating it away better than bankruptcy and writing off the debts?
Unfortunately, most of the rebuilding of bridges, damns, solar power, etc. would not be done by Americans or American companies.
Dallas spent millions putting in a huge bridge across the Trinity river and gave the contract to an Italian company which used Italian steel. They even had to import Italian steel workers because there were none in the entire US able to work. Of course, the Italian workers turned out to actually be Slovakians who couldn’t get back in the US after a local news channel pointed out how ludicrous it all was.
They are hiring a Chinese company right now to replace the San Francisco Bay Bridge, using Chinese steel and Chinese labor. I kid you not.
Where is the media on this? Remember Dubai Ports world?
Bridge Comes to San Francisco With the Made-in-China Label
– 26 JUNE 2011
Is that all???? saving 5-6% is pretty sad numbers.. if it was a billion or 2 it would make sense but $400 mill
======
At $7.2 billion, it will be the singular of the many costly structures ever built. But California officials guess that they will save during slightest $400 million by carrying so most of the work finished in China
If wishes were horses we’d all be cowboys
Just by giving money to business does not mean they can have a profitable business model. Where have we seen that perhaps in the building/housing industry very recently? Making concrete iron based projects will only employ over paid hard hats workers and then your theory suggests trickledown economics. That did not work very well either in the republican past. I am not convinced this approach will work. We need educated sensible entrepreneurs who will make a commitment to America and assume some social responsibilities.
I think America has gone full circle. People will need to start at the bottom of the business cycle and build up from there onwards. In the meantime life will be hard but we will get used to the new normal. New normal is limping along the bottom for a while. I think the best case scenario is we get Japan. But watch out if there is any other shock to the system then all bets are off and the Great Recession/ depression continues on. Imho
Let’s consider the alternative to the current federal policy of propping up housing prices:
1) Elimination of federally-funded housing price support would soon lead to a better match between local incomes and home prices — i.e., home prices would become affordable to the local labor force.
2) Affordable home prices would result in a much higher rate of home sales, putting used home sellers, furniture sellers, home applicance sellers, and workers in many other industries connected to home sales back to work.
3) The need to pour billions and billions of federal tax dollars into the effort to prop up home prices would be eliminated.
4) Jobs would be created without the need to raise taxes, as the uptick in home sales and related employment opportunities would be funded by turning the economic potential energy of overvalued housing prices into the economic kinetic energy of ever-improving affordability.
5) Lower home prices would provide the next generation of American workers with the opportunity to locate and lay down roots where the jobs are, providing a solid foundation for long-term economic recovery.
Where is the downside to any of this?
It throws just about every current homeowner under the bus.
Foreclosures would soar and banks would continue to run to our treasury and demand bailouts.
“It throws just about every current homeowner under the bus.”
So far renters, middle-class workers and young people with no jobs nor means to ever hope to afford a home have been persistently thrown under the bus. But I guess you are right — it would be unfair to ask wealthy homeowners to share in the collective sacrifice.
“Foreclosures would soar and banks would continue to run to our treasury and demand bailouts.”
Maybe the next treasury secretary will come up with policies that a more Democratic: I.e., they favor America’s Main Street households and let the banks which made bad loans reap the consequences of their folly.
We can always hope for change, right?
Property tax revenues would plummet, triggering even bigger budget cuts by state and local governments.
There is no doubt in my mind that the housing bubble was bad for the country. It made our country less competitive and caused massive malinvestment. It caused environmental destruction as forests were cut down to develop farmland and desert. It encouraged overspending by individuals, companies, and governments.
A sudden correction would be equally devastating. Neither flood nor drought are healthy.
“Property tax revenues would plummet, triggering even bigger budget cuts by state and local governments.”
Sounds like some other kind of taxes might be needed to pay for state and local government services which we all love and think of as free, since they are funded through property taxes.
Indeed.
There does not seem to be much support for an increase in any kind of tax or any new kind of tax. An income tax initiative was defeated in Washington state last fall.
I spoke with a man a few months ago who felt that we should only have sales taxes. He thought that if we had neither property nor income taxes, then it would be possible to live on a piece of land and be self supporting with very little income. Interestingly, a restructuring of the formula for distribution of sales taxes has played havoc with the budget of some towns in Washington state.
“A sudden correction would be equally devastating.”
It started five years ago. How short does the time for a correction to play out have to be to qualify as ’sudden’?
An excellent question and one that is not easily answered. I would say that it is better to judge based on the effects of the correction rather than a specific time period. I believe this is what our leaders have been trying to do. Not easy - it is a bit like trying to drive using the view in the rear view mirror. The big mistakes were made during the run up of the bubble.
A faster correction may have led us down the path that Russia took. We may still end up there. Which is better, Russia’s situation or Japan’s? Russia has more resources. Japan started out in a better place. Russia has a history of totalitarianism. Japan has a couple of generations that have experienced democracy. So it may not be a valid comparison, but I would rather live in Japan than Russia.
To me this is the result of the FED’s inflationary policies. They’ve been inflating the cost of of living for decades. For awhile, the easy money loans made it seem like incomes could support the inflated costs. Once we reached a level where incomes could no longer service ever increasing debts, a necessary adjustment needed to happen. But, they created such a huge problem that the response was to try and pump out even greater amounts of debt, to keep the Ponsi scheme going. To make matters worse the Federal, State and local governments have been just as irresponsible in their borrowing and spending. We need the cost of living to come down in line with incomes, but since their are huge debts with sunk cost at high levels, the Fed is doing everything it can to keep assets inflated. I think a lot of this started with Greenspan, and the unwillingness to allow natural smaller contractions in the business cycle to take place, every couple years. Were now paying for it with the mother of all contractions taking place, with the FED fighting it tooth and nail, dragging it out. I think were in for a least one lost decade.
I believe a policy of trying to keep inflation artificially low while at the same time lending trillions into existence created a sort of boiler economy which started blowing giant bubbles. Finally a bubble cracked and the inflationary pressure is gone, but so is the engine that drove our economy.
IMO if not this year then definitely in the next 5 years we will see huge cuts (gasp) in entitlement spending. Not because we did not promise etc, but because there is not enough money in the universe to pay for it all. Not without inflation (wage inflation specifically).
“Not enough money in the universe”
And that’s the crux of it.
I believe however, there are enough frequent flier miles.
That is because frequent flier miles are only a few hundred feet…
“IMO if not this year the definitely in the next 5 years we will see huge cuts (gasp) in entitlement spending.”
Agree. And these cuts means there will be less money going into the economy, which is deflationary.
Promised money is similar to borrowed money in that it is considered an asset to the person who is supposed to be receiving it.
People who believe they will be receiving big chunks of money every year and are depending on receiving big chunks of money every year are going to be in dire straits if this money is not forthcoming.
And a consumer-based economy that depends heavily on these people receiving this money and spending this money every year is also going to be in dire straights.
I foresee a popping of the health care bubble when Medicaid and Medicare spending decline.
I agree Ben…After watching this slowly unfold over the last three years the its quite evident how many people were riding the bubble wave…
From the article; “It will take a long time for the middle class to rebuild its wealth, especially if we don’t find some work”.
When this bust first started to unfold I was not sure where we were headed…I could only reflect on 1981-82 as a comparison for me…The wealth destruction (not just housing) that has occurred in this great recession now dwarfs the 1981-82 downturn…
I have friends today, hard working prudent people that never recovered (30 years) from the 1981-82 washout…This crash has taken many millions down with it and the idea that they will be able to “rebuild” their wealth over the next 10 or 20 years is pure fantasy IMO…
Maybe the US will never have the economy we’ve had in the past. But we could possibly stop the decline. The debate about how to accomplish that is wide ranging.
Let’s look at some of the proposals above; it’s obvious to me that “stopping the foreclosure crisis” didn’t create one real job, or preserve real wealth. Propping up house prices was a futile failure. Giving a bunch of money to banks didn’t produce any jobs. Remember how we we’re told, and are still told that housing was the “key” to economic recovery? It’s balderdash. The last thing we need are more houses!
We get all the negatives; moral hazard, zombie corporations, higher than sustainable rent and house prices, saving/investing is discouraged, and worst of all, a bunch more debt and lost time.
You know, the REIC had their chance and we got nothing out of it. It’s time to change course.
I love a person that uses the word “balderdash”
‘Remember how we we’re told, and are still told that housing was the “key” to economic recovery? It’s balderdash.’
I was reflecting on this yesterday during a long drive. The thinking in DC seems to be something like, ‘The economy sure was humming along during the housing bubble. So all we need to do to get the economy back on its feet is to get another housing bubble going.’
- Never mind all the folks going into foreclosure now.
- Never mind millions and millions of vacant tract homes, in excess of what we need to house American families over the next three decades.
- Never mind the collapse in housing prices which washed America’s collective household wealth down the drain.
We need to get this bubble going again!
its quite evident how many people were riding the bubble wave…
“Until the tide goes out, you don’t know who is swimming naked.” — Oracle of Omana.
People like Warren Buffett cause low tides.
Businesses look for ways to cut costs. If you tax them more, you will see them cut costs elsewhere in the form of layoffs. As a corollary, if you tax them less, they can hire more people.
Many people who realize that there is a smaller market for $400,000 houses than $200,000 houses, still refuse to apply the same economic principle to taxation of business.
The U.S. has the second highest corporate tax rate in the developed world. And people still are p.o.’d that businesses are still outsourcing our high paying jobs.
I also point to unions who priced their workers out of work.
Comapanies do not hire more people simply becauase they have more money. They prefer to keep that money as profit. They only hire more people when there is an increase in profitable demand for their services. To get back to that, we must stop offshoring high-paying US jobs to ppl in Chindexico who will work for $5/day because they’re really just slaves.
Exactly!…it’s an eCONomic… BONU$$$$$$$…to relentlessly pur$ue low cost labor $alaries + low co$t LAND & FACILITIE$ + ZERO-TO-NOTHING CorpInc.’$ TAXE$ in… foreign countries.
Then “TruePatriotCEO’$™” plead, plead, plead: “give u$ a tax repatriation holiday and we’ll bring the money back and start creating Job$! Job$! Job$!…”
Now who do you think get$ that BONU$$$$$$$???
Who?
“TruePathtoProsperity™” is their current 2012 political
mottomantra…they have a plan…trust them…here’s their self-labeled “Bidne$$” card name: “TruePurity™”50ina40, is your S key broke?
RogerCharlieTango…
The MegaInc.$,…they’re $uffering $o! Hurry! reduce/eliminate their taxe$, hurry,… Cinder$ & Ashe$…Agonie$ & Pain$, help ‘em.
“Of the roughly $90 billion of profit$ repatriated in 2004, Pfizer was by far the biggest beneficiary, $aving $11 billion in taxes, Johnston recalls. “They started destroying jobs the day they brought it back” and have cut 40,000 U.S. jobs in the ensuing years.
+10 Big V!
I think that the American people are coming to their senses one by one. You can see it in the comments on the new sites. There are a lot of comments that simply repeat the talking points like this, but they are starting to be outnumbered.
Sometimes I think it takes someone to have personally had their job outsourced to understand.
For some reason, a lot of people think it is a character flaw that is the cause.
Yup, it’s easy to believe that those who get laid off are “losers” until you get the tap on the shoulder.
The US has the third lowest effective corporate tax rate in the world (from a link posted on this blog a while back, no I don’t have it still), since so many loopholes and deductions are available to US corporations. Also, US corporations are not required to pay bribe money just to keep the lights on. It is true, however, that corporate America (seeThe Business Roundtable) has chosen to pay some very well-placed bribe money to Congress, the news media, and to universities over the past 30 years, and that bribe money has paid off handsomely.
Thanks to all that bribing, US corporations now have access to slaves across the globe. They can pollute and abuse with impunity. They come up in the world thanks to the creativity and productivity of the American system, and then they flip US the bird when they get big enough to start pillaging the globe by flouting our basic legal and ethical principles.
What is wrong with this picture?
They
can…do… pollute and abuse with impunity.AS it focuses on patterns of behavior
IT focuses on patterns of behavior
FOCUSES on patterns of behavior
ON patterns of behavior
PATTERNS of behavior
patterns of behavior
patterns of behavior
patterns of behavior
patterns
OF
BEHAVIOR
Bill:
What would you say to shifting the tax burden so that companies who hire Americans pay less, and companies who hire non-Americans pay more?
*crickets*
I think social engineering in all forms SUCKS. Tinkering with taxes to encourage this or discourage that is a big social engineering deal. It’s a Wesley Mouch wet dream to tinker with the tax code to achieve social ends.
The best approach is to only have tariffs. Get rid of all other taxes. No income tax, no consumption tax, no capital gains tax, no dividends tax, no airport security tax, no utilities tax, no social security tax, no medicare tax, and so on.
America got along very well before 1916 when the thirteenth amendment was enacted and this was before dozens of other taxes were enacted.
America got along very well before 1916
That’s because the textbooks you read were written by the well-off. Now think about the millions of people who weren’t in the textbooks.
That’s ridiculous. I require proof.
Why go back to 1916? America was doing pretty well in 1975, before Jack Welch convinced us that short term profit for stakeholders was better than long-term welfare of the middle class.
1975? Energy crisis? Inflation? “Whip Inflation Now?” The middle class squeeze was just in its infancy. The Shah of Iran was getting trouble politically. It was past the end of the era of one stay-at-home spouse. IIRC, we were still backing Israel and we had the marine barracks bombing to look forward to in 1983 as a result of our support of Israel.
We were still better off collectively in 1975 than today.
We were also better off in 1954 than we were in 1975….
And how much of that was a temporary bubble in competitiveness due to the competition having destroyed each other with some help from us?
We were also better off in 1954 than we were in 1975
And the rich paid huge marginal tax rates.
There are many who say that a tariff is just a tax. By this reasoning, if you are in favor of tariffs, then you are in favor of taxing companies that offshore their labor.
BTW, are borders a type of social engineering? What about the constitution and the cops? Because if that’s social engineering, then we need it. Where does the Bill draw the line?
Tariffs were the largest source of revenue in the USA from 1790 to WWI. About 68% of the revenue at the time the 16th amendment was passed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_United_States_history
think social engineering in all forms SUCKS. Tinkering with taxes to encourage this or discourage that is a big social engineering deal.
Funny how protectionism (both goods and jobs) and tax policies works well for Korea, Japan, China, India, etc.
We’re the only chumps with open markets are they are cleaning our clock out.
Who is Wesley Mouch?
Geez Bill it’s nice that “Bidne$$” get the safety of America’s…$700 Billion$ per year… citizen/taxpayer $upplied Military Industrial Complex protection ain’t it?
How about all that “Bidne$$” daily “utilized” Trillon$$$$$$$$$ of U$ Gov’t National Infra$ture like Hydro-Dams, Interstate & intrastate hwy’s, etc. etc. National communcation systems, etc. etc. etc. to $hip their “Bidne$$” good$ for free, daily!
Poor GE Inc., Pfizer Inc., BMW Inc.,…et.al.,… they’re $uffering $o. Cinder$ & Ashe$, Agonie$ & Pain$…
“…if you tax them less, they can hire more people.”
Ho ho, hah hah, hehehehehehe, BwaHaHaAhHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! (Cantankerous Intellectual Bomb-thrower™)
Teenage kids DO want to get jobs. Unfortunately, they are beat out of the market by illegal adults who work for less than minimum wage and don’t expect workplace safety.
Ahansen: Why don’t you get off your couch and do some of your own chores, rather than whining that the local teenagers won’t do it unless you pay them enough to make it worth it?
Most teenagers want a job so they can get a car. If they can’t earn enough to save up for a car over a couple years by working weekends/evenings, then there’s no incentive. Just like the ADULTS in this world, kids also need to be paid a fair wage.
The trick is to stop giving all our jobs (high, middle, and low end) to citizens of other countries.
I do do all my own chores, hon, (all of those mentioned in my post and many, many more,) which is why as I approach 60, I would be glad to pay some young person or retiree to help me out with some of the heavy lifting and skilled repair. The problem is how to communicate that fact to a far-flung and isolated rural population base. Many up here don’t have electricity, let alone internet or phone connections.
Your presumptions here are… erroneous; I am neither “whining,” nor impugning the locals’ willingness to work (for pay or for board, or more typically barter.) The people up here, myself included, do hard backbreaking work all day, every day– cattle ranching is not for wimps. (Nor, I might add, is keeping 100+ beehives productive in the middle of July.) At issue, and what I was responding to, were emergent opportunities for those marginalized by corporate unemployment.
Again I must mention that you would be taken much more seriously– both here and in life in general– if you could stick to the topics at hand and curtail your wild generalizations and ad hominum attacks. As someone put it the other day
“…You should try to be less snippety with ppl.”
And you have some idea of how seriously I am taken, “both here and in life in genera” how again?
I have very little respect for a person who declares that job opportunities are “rife” for today’s young people, when that person herself was young during much, much, much better times.
“Times” in the late sixties, as the bulge of the Boomerz sought to enter the job market, or keep their arses intact in VietNam or on our campuses and city streets, were anything but “much, much, much” better for students, house and job seekers– as anyone who was alive and sentient then can tell you.
Not only were the young vilified in all strata of society and constantly excoriated in the press, we also realized we’d been sold a bill of goods about the American Dream, yet were still expected to finance it for our elders until the day they died. Oh, and die for it ourselves in their dumb wars. (We didn’t have a choice then, you see…)
The only job applications available for female college graduates all literally asked “how many words a minute do you type?” You got your choice of secretary, nurse, school teacher. Period. Citizens were up in arms over the very idea of allowing women onto police and fire forces– let alone into boardrooms or professorships.
Those “hippie” communes? We lived with multiple (often rotten,) roommates into our late twenties and early thirties for a reason. Sound familiar? Now, when times are hard again, many of us are housing our parents, our kids, and THEIR kids.
Again, with the wild generalizations based on limited personal experience. You’re much smarter than this, dear.
You are living in your own little world.
No, she speaks of the world that I and others of that age lived. My rant would be of the young white male with the world on his shoulders. Then the single father of four. I’m sure your wouldn’t get it.
“job opportunities are rife for those”
“this practice was not so rife in the upper”
I know. A year of reading this blog and not seeing the word “rife”, and today it shows up twice in one post. Can’t be a good sign.
Haven’t figured out the italicizing on this blog yet. As in NOT so rife….
The trick is to stop giving all our jobs (high, middle, and low end) to citizens of other countries.
What are you? Some kind of communist?!
America belongs to the wealthy, everyone else can drop dead (since we can replace them with imported people!)
God Bless America (or Darwin if you prefer)
I worked a paper route when I was 12-13 and maintained several neighbors gardens. It gave me about Ten Pounds a week worth of income, which afforded my expensive model airplane hobby and some savings.
Today this would not have been possible. I don’t thing anyone even thinks about hiring kids for these kinds of jobs anymore.
Nope. A full-grown Mexican man can mow a lawn in less time for less money than a 13-year-old boy. That Mexican will drive around all day in his beater truck and mow all the lawns in town all day long, not just on weekends. A full-grown Mexican woman can take care of 3 kids all day long for less money than it would cost to pay a full-time 13-year-old girl on summer break. A lot of adult householders these days are complaining that teenagers won’t work for them, but who’s really to blame? I think the blame lies with the person who chooses illegal labor over legal.
Some jobs are considered by teenagers to be “cool”, some aren’t.
The cool jobs are the ones you see being worked by teenagers, the ones that are not cool are being worked by immigrants.
Teens work in Starbucks because having a Starbucks job is cool. But it’s not cool to be mowing lawns because mowing lawns is something Mexicans do.
Plus there is the dependability issue. Near the beach towns, for example, if the surf is up then half of the teen employees won’t show up for work.
Mexicans like to disappear for a few days and then show back up with no explanation. American kids know better than that.
Never eat at a restaurant when a Mexican or Spanish football club is playing in your town. There won’t be anyone in the kitchen.
You are right, Big V. I remember when I was a kid that kids/teenagers would mow lawns and get paid for it. That was until about 1990 (give or take a year) when a “landscaping company” staffed by Mexicans (likely illegal) came into town. Within one summer, everyone in my neighborhood stopped having teenagers mow their lawns and switched over to the Mexicans. I’m not sure how much the Mexican landscaping company charged, and I think they may have offered more services than the teenagers (since they would have more time than the teenagers). I moved away from that neighborhood when I grew up but I get back there a few times a year at least and nothing has changed. Teenagers aren’t mowing lawns anymore.
I’m sure that many of the people who have illegal Mexicans mow their laws complain that teenagers aren’t willing to do work like mow laws. However, what I had seen happen 20 years ago shows that they will hire illegal Mexicans over neighborhood teenagers for that work even when the teenagers were clearly willing to do it.
I guess my little burg must exist in some kind of time warp, as the only areas that get “professionaly” mown are the common areas (AKA parks). You rarely see a landscape crew in my neighborhood mowing someone’s yard.
I don’t thing anyone even thinks about hiring kids for these kinds of jobs anymore ??
Why ?? IMO, liability….You are just one small accident away from the large manila envelope in the mail from some Plaintiff Lawyer sucking as much blood out of you that they can….
Why would there be less liability if an illegal runs over his foot with a mower than a 13 year old boy?
Because the illegal will not sue you. He will get free emergency care, though.
No illegal will bring a lawsuit for fear of being deported. That’s the way business owners like it. You can be as unsafe as you want and pay as little as you want, and no illegal will say a peep.
Meanwhile, near my house, a developer began to redo the storefronts of a small strip mall on the main drag. Potential day laborers have started sitting on the curb in the parking lot directly across the street. They must be trying to get work, because nothing else is under construction. Well, they must be obtaining trabajo, because more of them have been showing up in the past couple weeks.
Yep, so sad scdave.
Fear! & Fear! + America + Perva$ive
A very u$eful political tools, kind like a hammer & vise-grips, covers many $it-u-ations
Something else that needs to be done if the economy is to repair is to change the way we score credit. Having gone through this in the past, we all go about life with our basket of credit eggs and it takes very little to break them all and almost permanently.
If you lose a job and cannot pay your visa card, medical bills, mortgage etc for 6 months your credit is absolutely destroyed for a very long time. Paying it off later makes very little difference and could even reset the reporting statute on the debt, extending the length of time it remains on a report.
IMO, once a debt is repaid in full any hit on your score should be pretty minimal, but paying a collection account is little better than not paying one at all, leaving folks who hit the skids in the recession effectively removed from the economy for a very long time.
True dat. I worked as a bill collector between high school and college, so this became apparent to me rather early in life. It is nearly impossible to get a person with bad credit to pay the bills they already owe. Why should they?
is to repair is to change the way we score credit ??
Ya think…I did a refinance recently with my daughter…Her credit score was around 730 I believe…Well, a unpaid utility bill from 7 years ago popped up on her credit report…It was a closing bill from a house she moved out of…It was for $6.97…She new nothing of it…It lowered her credit score by 40 points..The lender said if we wanted the premium pricing on the refinance it was best that I leave my daughter off the loan because of her reduced credit score and that is exactly what we did…
A case like that I suspect the statute of reporting may have been reached, but either way paying off the bill should clear it if common sense were to prevail - which of course it does not!
IF she does pay the bill it will reset the statute of reporting another 7 years and will report as a “paid charge off” so whatever she does DON’T do that!
Somehow companies can get notice when you refinance. I had a friend that worked at the old Countrywide and would cold call people that were attempting to refinance with someone else.
I suspect, the owner of the $6.97 also got wind of this and immediately had the forgotten debt inserted into your daughter’s credit report in hopes that she would immediately pay it off.
I had read in various MSM financial publications sometime ago that FICO (if that is what they used and not a Vantage score) was going to stop calculating collections under $100 into their scores for this very reason.
It’s So Simple, BUT it’s the thing that must never be said.
What must never be said,
Housing is 20% of the economy in most locals (not all but most)
Agents, escrow, insurance, finance , landscape, builders,… etc the list goes on.
What must never be said,
YOU WILL NEVER HAVE AN ECONOMIC RECOVERY UNTIL THE MAJORITY OF UNDERWATER HOME OWNERS ARE NO LONGER UNDER WATER,
One way or the other..
YOU WILL NEVER HAVE AN ECONOMIC RECOVERY UNTIL THE MAJORITY OF
UNDERWATER“Paid-too-much” HOME OWNERS ARE NO LONGERUNDER WATER, caterogized as ” “Paid-too-much” HOME OWNERS!Better clarity.
It’s So Simple, BUT it’s the thing that must never be said.
For those who haven’t heard me harp on this before, here again is the link to provide comments on the pending regulation of the Qualified Residential Mortgage program.
regulations.gov/#!searchResults;cp=O;rpp=10;po=0;s=OCC-2011-0002
The requirements for the QRM gold standard are high enough to pop this housing bubble for good. Banks and re-al-tors know it, which is why they are commenting against it like crazy.
Folks, this is real legislative action, with on-the-ground details. Public comments go directly to the people making the decisions. I think that it would be much more effective to submit a comment there than to repeat “realtors are liars” and “end the FED” over and over again here.
Let me post some excerpts from one of the comments. I’ll do that below.
Excerpts from the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) comment from June 1, 2011, and sums up the industry position very well:
————
…While the rules should not condone risky lending practices, unnecessarily constraining the mortgage market will not only deny the American dream of homeownership to many qualified persons, it will further depress the housing market and threaten the economic recovery.
…Because underwriting is an art and not a science, lenders should retain discretion within acceptable parameters. Instead, the QRM should be defined using flexible guidelines rather than specific parameters in order to preserve lenders’ ability to adapt to borrowers’ needs …
…Regulators should be mindful of the relationship between the QRM definition and Federal Housing Administration (FHA) eligibility requirements in light of FHA’s exemption from risk retention requirements. Unless the QRM definition is calibrated properly, there is a danger that the FHA program could be over utilized.
————
MBA even has some helpful suggestions:*
———-
“Qualified Residential Mortgage” (QRM)… should
• not Include Certain Prohibited Terms including: Balloon payments, Terms longer than 30 years, Negative amortization.
• Be Fully Documented: Notably, this term and accompanying requirements for “verification” should be defined in the rule. MBA can provide examples.
• Not Encompass Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs) Which Adjust In Less than Three Years after Origination: Based on performance data, ARMs which have fixed payment periods of at least three years to prime borrowers should qualify as QRMs as long as other factors assure sound underwriting.
• DTI’s should not be required to be lower than 50 percent, with specific compensating factors,
• Encompass Interest-Only Mortgages if other Requirements are Put in Place.
———–
The first few excerpts all basically say “don’t tell us how to run our business… let US decide how to lend money.” ( I do however, agree with the point about FHA, which I’ve seen in other comments. There is some real conflict between the FHA standards and the QRM program. However, there aren’t first-time buyers to make a difference in the overall market, it doesn’t really matter what the reg says.)
All of those helpful “suggestions” point at the same thing. The MBA wants to water down the Gold Standard to include the sh%t lending products that got us into this mess in the first place. More than that, they want the watered-down standards to STILL carry the stamp of approval from the government. Much as the MBA hates government, they have no scruples about hoodwinking a buyer into a crap loan because “the government said it was okay.”
—————-
, and then they suggest that the government write specifically what THEY want into the regulation. Regulators will probably see this as an insult.
* This is some heavy hypocrisy. First the MBA demands that the government not to write specific regulations (after all, banks know best
Demand….
There is none in the absence of credit.
Demand….
The very fundamental that drives employment.
Roads/bridges/water/wastewater are built to satisfy demand. There is no demand though. I’m all for heavy and highway construction as it is my stock in trade and I have no problem with borrowing to get the stuff built but for what? Under-utilization is the end result by going on a construction binge. Post-industrial USA is here and there is no reason to add to or upsize infrastructure given the current utilization. We can create domestic demand all day long by going back to the nightmarish years of the housing and credit bubble. The Housing Crime Syndicate is praying, hoping and bribing public officials to do just that.
I’m just a dumb construction guy so you smarter folks tell me what I’m missing.
Do you have any peanut butter ice cream in the freezer? I think you might be missing that.
There is a demand to fix what we already have, not to build new. We don’t need to build ghost cities a la China, but there’s a bridge in Minnesota that could have used a little more care.
Simple solution to 100% employment and strong economy.
Option 1:
- Reduce your cost of living and quality of life.
- Reduce your salary to match the salary of folks in China, India and Bangladesh.
- Stop all immigration.
Option2:
- Increase your cost of living and quality of life from rest of the world.
- Try to get higher and higher salary.
- Increase high-end-skill based immigration. Give on the spot Green Cards to all highly skilled doctors, engineers and scientists from rest of the world.
That doesn’t even make any sense.
Why should we allow the corporate elite to reduce our standard of living and wages? How does that benefit us? Stopping immigration sounds like a good idea, though.
How would giving EVEN MORE green cards to foreign doctors, engineers, and scientists help us? Wouldn’t that just decrease our salaries and employment levels even more? American scientists today are making less money than they did 20 years ago, thanks to waaaaaaaaaaay too many imported scientists, who mostly are very poorly trained and quite snooty.
Hard to get software development work anymore that pays well thanks to imported labor and off-shored work.
This issue is in large part why we are in the mess we are in today.
If we are truly to reach an equilibrium with the rest of the world, then a few things need to chance here in the west. The first being the legalization of homelessness allowing folks to live wherever they can in cardboard shanty towns or concrete boxes provided by the government with no carpet or furniture with several generations living in a few hundred square feet.
Having lived in Hong Kong, Peru, Bolivia and a couple of African countries I know first hand how the majority of folks in the third world live. We are not going to like it much if that is truly the direction we are going.
Why should we allow the corporate elite to reduce our standard of living and wages?
Because the rich will get even richer?
I’m really sick of the “the only is for everyone to be poor”. What happened to all that increased productivity? We are collectively generating more wealth than ever before, the problem is some one else gets to keep the fruits that increased productivity.
But yeah, the Czar didn’t get it and neither did Marie Antoinette, until it was too late.
the only way out of this is for everyone to be poor
I need to proof before posting.
“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.””
Bullcrap. Most of those jobs are done by illegals now or adults… and have been for decades because the adult needed the work since outsourcing took off in the 1980s.
“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.””
Despite your personal experience, there really ISN’T enough business in rural areas to support them. You are right about it not being much different in suburban communities as well. There isn’t enough business there to support them either, but for different reasons. The biggest being competition from the nearest city.
In the mid-90’s, when I was a late teen and playing out in clubs with various bands, there were locally-owned boutique shops and stores everywhere. It was great.
The reason all of that stuff existed is because real estate was cheap, so people could get by on hobbies and oddities. Notice I said “get by” and not “rich.” That is what has been frustrating for me in all of this. Everyone is running at the margins, full speed ahead, just to get by.
My wife had a friend recently post on FB (the one that always brags about off-shoring success), “It’s about time the government started working on nights and weekends like me.”
O.k., except you’re a single workaholic that never takes vacation and is miserable. I don;t want that for anybody, public or private. I used to use recording software by a Swedish company that SHUT DOWN every summer for two months of vacation. Nobody died. There is a pizza joint here on the beach, and one, I remember, in Hoboken that shut down for months at a time for whatever reason. Nobody died.
This all runs off the price of real estate. I want to be able to take my son to some hole-in-the-wall hobby place to look at Lionel shit.
GAH.
Cash is king.
Debt is slavery.
Drink lots of wine.
Got popcorn?