Real unemployment ? 17,3 %

[WildspitzE]

Re: Real unemployment ? 17,3 %

It is vs the skilled labor that this country so desperately needs if it want's to produce something, it isn't vs purchasing power.

18/hr for stay at home paper shufflers and form fillers is way too much.

[Rajiv]

Re: Real unemployment ? 17,3 %

In 1974, $2 per hour was the minimum wage (that is you were breaking the law if you paid somebody less than that) -- it was a living wage. (but not a good wage) if that had been pegged to real inflation (CPI + lies,) the minimum wage would have been $27.50 per hour! So therefore if minimum wage had kept up with true inflation, it would have been illegal to pay $18/hr for any work - paper shuffling or not!

[WildspitzE]

Re: Real unemployment ? 17,3 %

I understood your point the first time.

Ah, nevermind.

[Rajiv]

Re: Real unemployment ? 17,3 %

I do understand your point -- and I also agree that work should be about doing useful things -- but if paid work was really about that and people were really paid for the useful things they did for society, then you would not have billion dollar bonus pools!

[bcassill]

No, it's 22%

The REAL unemployment rate is 22%. Check out www.shadowstats.com. John Walter thinks that unemployment that unemployment may get as high as 35% before it's all over with. The BLS statistics are pretty much useless when trying to gauge unemployment and inflation.:cool:

[Jay]

Re: Real unemployment ? 17,3 %

Thanks Rajiv, I knew ND had done well through this and that they had a government bank. I was looking for more info on it and you have provided it! Gives one a lot to ponder on a sustainable path forward doesn't it.

[Rajiv]

Re: Real unemployment ? 17,3 %

Jay,

Here was an editorial in the Arizona Daily Star - Here's something about North Dakota worth imitating

In January 2009, the group Democracy for America — Tucson brought Ellen Hodgson Brown, author of "Web of Debt," to Tucson to discuss the economic crisis and to offer suggestions.

One that she offered was for state governments to form their own banks and, using fractional reserve banking practices and a government-owned bank, to create the money they need and lend it to themselves — just the way privately owned banks do.

Local and state governments have become dependent on borrowing to finance day-to-day operations and have been severely impacted by the frozen credit markets.

However, in addition to providing short-term financing, state-owned banks could supply financing for long-term investments in state resource development such as solar energy.

There is an almost universal consensus on the need for developing new and, especially, renewable energy sources. What has been missing is the money to pay for that development.

As Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke has observed, money is astonishingly easy and inexpensive to create. (It doesn't even require a printing press — just a few computer keystrokes.)
However, under our current system of privately created money, the focus has been on short-term, speculative, mainly paper investments in Wall Street-created "wealth."

Just as at the start of the Great Depression, U.S. hydroelectric energy resources remained undeveloped because private investors were unwilling to make the required investments, so today Arizona's energy potential remains untapped.

The monetary and financial systems in the U.S. and other Western countries are broken. Investors and larger banks will continue to send money to Wall Street and U.S. jobs to Asia just as the logic of maximizing short-term monetary gains dictates they should.

We need to create parallel systems with a longer-term perspective focusing on the needs of present and future generations of Arizonans. The model for this has been in place for nearly a century — the state-owned Bank of North Dakota.

North Dakota was one of only two U.S. states to run a budget surplus last year. It had the lowest (4.1 percent) unemployment rate in the country in November 2009. But it is not Arizona: The mission of the Bank of North Dakota "is to promote agriculture, commerce and industry in North Dakota." About 30 percent of its loans fund student education.
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[flintlock]

Re: Real unemployment ? 17,3 %

I went to lunch at a Chinese restaurant yesterday. Plastered all over the walls were flyers advertising Census work. Did not see a pay rate, but then only the first few lines were in English.

As far as minimum wage adjusted for CPI. It does not surprise me to read that minimum wage adjusted for CPI would be in the upper $20s. I've told people for years that wages have not kept up. Not even close. I worked summers as an electrician's helper while going to college back in the early 80s. I remember making $5.50 hour. They make only a few dollars more than that now( minimum wage basically) 27 years later! :eek:

That said, wages are based on supply and demand of labor in the workforce, not by need or what some statistic says. So yes, $18 hour for census work is ridiculous. Those jobs could be easily filled for half that. But then why would government change the way it pays people. :rolleyes: They've never let market forces interfere with a good jobs program.

Let's face it folks. We have far too many low and unskilled( and even skilled in some cases) people for far too few jobs. I don't really see any major change to that trend. So welcome to the permanent welfare state.

[WildspitzE]

Re: Real unemployment ? 17,3 %

I do understand your point -- and I also agree that work should be about doing useful things -- but if paid work was really about that and people were really paid for the useful things they did for society, then you would not have billion dollar bonus pools!

I would agree with you b/c of how the current system is rigged, whereby the taxpayers explicitly (and implicitly through inflation) support the financial services industry. That said, I do believe that honest financial intermediaries can play an important role in a truly free market society, and if those entities *earn* (as in the real definition ) those bonuses by efficiently allocating capital, etc. then so be it. However, we're far from any sort of ideal system, so I agree with you on the bailout bonuses and the overall stench of the situation.

But that same sort of intellectual honesty should be applied to these census jobs or any sort of job where the taxpayer is on the hook - regardless of where it is on the pay scale. What sort of incentives are we creating here?

The closer that wage goes vs productive skilled labor (and if it surpasses it) the worst these incentives become, and they're done at the expense of the productive (especially as this pool diminishes). It's a slippery slope.

I do appreciate your posts on how disingenuous the MW scheme is. Minimum wage (MW) was/is a small rotting bone thrown to the masses in consideration for the ability to inflate. It shouldn't surprise you that it is kept lower than inflation, just like SSN payments (another populist bone, but really another tax) are adjusted for the same inflation. MW is an artificial construct, and like all govt attempts to control things, it's never right and it will have disruptive effects as a whole every time it's moved (up or down) by a bureaucrat w/out regard to where the mkt is pricing labor.

[WildspitzE]

Re: Real unemployment ? 17,3 %

I went to lunch at a Chinese restaurant yesterday. Plastered all over the walls were flyers advertising Census work. Did not see a pay rate, but then only the first few lines were in English.

As far as minimum wage adjusted for CPI. It does not surprise me to read that minimum wage adjusted for CPI would be in the upper $20s. I've told people for years that wages have not kept up. Not even close. I worked summers as an electrician's helper while going to college back in the early 80s. I remember making $5.50 hour. They make only a few dollars more than that now( minimum wage basically) 27 years later! :eek:

That said, wages are based on supply and demand of labor in the workforce, not by need or what some statistic says. So yes, $18 hour for census work is ridiculous. Those jobs could be easily filled for half that. But then why would government change the way it pays people. :rolleyes: They've never let market forces interfere with a good jobs program.

Let's face it folks. We have far too many low and unskilled( and even skilled in some cases) people for far too few jobs. I don't really see any major change to that trend. So welcome to the permanent welfare state.

Well said.... the guy in the middle, with no bureaucrat ombudsman trying to protect him, is going to continue to get squeezed.