01/13/2009
The Obama Stimulus Plan is out.Sadly, here is no recovery plan for most VDARE.com readers. The arithmetic is pretty clear. Basically what is touted as a "recovery" doesn’t keep up with immigration and growth of the workforce-and the "grand plan" is to wind up in 2014 with a higher unemployment rate than we had in 2007 — after years of Bush’s mismanagement of the economy — and after continued high rates of immigration.
The Obama Stimulus plan is getting cheers from Open Borders Radicals like Bernanke.
The basic assumption of the Keynesian approach to the business cycle is to "even things out" over time-it doesn’t really deal with a situation in which there are fundamental structural problems with an economy. Even Corporate Media like Reuters is starting to realize, we are heading into another great Depression.
Or are we? Figures collected for Reuters by John Williams, from the electronic newsletter Shadowstats.com, suggest that, while we are not there yet, the comparison is not as outlandish as it might initially seem.By his count, if unemployment were still tallied the way it was in the 1930s, today’s jobless rate would be closer to 16.5 percent — more than double the stated rate.
"I expect that unemployment in the current downturn, which will be particularly deep and protracted, eventually will rival, if not top, the 25 percent seen in the Great Depression," Williams said.[Great Depression jobs parallel may not be far flung, By Pedro Nicolaci da Costa, January 8, 2009]
Williams material is interesting. I would in particular point to this explanation of his employment calculations.
However, the real figure we want to look at over time is how things are changing for a specific population. Immigration and importation of guest workers complicates these statistics significantly because unemployment among those pools of workers often means repatriation. Guest workers and illegal immigrants sometimes work jobs that can’t sustain their living expenses in hopes of getting a green card someday.
If we either look at the changes of the pool of workers present in the US in 2000 or say changes in citizen employment levels, things are worse than that 16.5% figure would indicate. What I would like to look at is what percentage of citizens are employed at sustainable jobs that involve actual ability to accumulate some long term savings. Beyond that 16.5% figure, we have a large block of citizens that are employed at work they can’t sustain in an attempt bankruptcy since during the bush administration bankruptcy was made a rather unattractive option.
What needs to be done is to look at the fundamentals of the US economy and the international economic order. The US economy might be said to be recovering when a smaller portion of the citizenry have zero or negative assets — and fewer assets are concentrated in the hands of the top 1% of the population. We need a situation in which jobs for citizens are growing faster than the natural increase of US citizens and the US trade deficit is balanced-or at least associated with capital investments in the US. I don’t think any of those things will happen without a major technological revolution and structural change of the US economy on a par with the industrial revolution. Change in this case needs to be more than a slogan.
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