Tangential Comment from Bachman thread - gnashing of teeth over political polarity

[mtnlaurel]

If everyone is so frickin' concerned about Family Values why don't they (whoever 'they' are) all REALLY focus on getting their BEhinds to the negotiating table and create jobs or at the very least an environment that will lead to JOBS FOR OUR FAMILIES.

This Great Recession has kicked my family in the nuts repeatedly and we are fraying because of it - if there is another serious dip in the economy due to them 'richarding' around up there with the debt ceiling, it's 'gonna be a mess.
And we did the responsible thing: advanced degrees (check), 6 month emergency fund (check), kids once we could afford them (check) - we got out of our mortgage immediately when my DH was laid off in the summer of '08, praise the Lord - and thankfully he's employed again after over a year of unemployment, thank the Lord.
I just don't think that my family can withstand getting clotheslined by the economy again....
I'm sure we could - I AM a crafty little survivor, so I know really we'll be ok - and obviously thanks to Voluntary Simplicity I'm not totally held hostage by consumerism.

If DC screws around and kills the illusion of the 'American Dream' they are going to have all kinds of trouble on their hands.
The belief that you can better your circumstances through hardwork & education is one of glues that holds us together as a nation.

[Tenngal]

because they are more concerned with the re-elections and re-lining of thier wealthy contributors pockets. How many of our elected officials really have to worry about jobs, healthcare, retirement, etc? If they had to contend with the same broken system as us, it would be different.

[ApatheticNoMore]

If everyone is so frickin' concerned about Family Values why don't they (whoever 'they' are) all REALLY focus on getting their BEhinds to the negotiating table and create jobs or at the very least an environment that will lead to JOBS FOR OUR FAMILIES.

I wonder how much is even in their power. I mean look the whole world is capsized. The latest news is Spain and Italy are on the verge of bankruptcy and the Euro nations can't really afford to bail them out if it came to that (these aren't little tiny economies, they are "too big to bail" ). Now that may seem off topic, but I'm just saying to some degree these problems are global. Global bond traders rule the world, yea those who will buy government debt. That's the cost paid for going in debt (as a country, but all countries run on debt to some degree it's just a question of how much).

So the global economy is in a very risky state. And that's just economic chaos, everyone knows the whole thing is fundamentally environmentally unsustainable as well.

This Great Recession has kicked my family in the nuts repeatedly and we are fraying because of it - if there is another serious dip in the economy due to them 'richarding' around up there with the debt ceiling, it's 'gonna be a mess.
And we did the responsible thing: advanced degrees (check), 6 month emergency fund (check), kids once we could afford them (check)

The thing about doing all the "right things" is that it can always be pooh poohed. Are your advanced degrees in liberal arts of social science? People can say: oh the horror, you should have gotten them in business, or engineering or healthcare. Until there are too many MBA's and then it's you should have gotten them in x, y, z. Not really my position, just what people do to DISTANCE themselves from those who are suffering by saying it could not happen to them because those people didn't do the right things like I do see.

As individuals we have *some* control to increase our odds of being successful, it would be ridiculous to argue otherwise, but the economy is severely fraying yes and a lot of sure paths aren't anymore. Any certain path to staying in the middle class based on degrees is becoming increasingly obsolete (I mean sure they sometimes improve your odds, but again no guarantee). It is probably not even a sophisticated enough approach for individuals these days, job markets for a field should probably be researched to death too, and even then things may change in the time it takes you to get the credentials. This isn't even done because people are raised on whole perceptions of the world that include things like "degrees will make you middle class", and these are basic world-views that sink in at a very deep level. Besides the job market is too complex for anyone to make total sense of, would probably take whole applications of chaos theory or something . We do what we can.

If DC screws around and kills the illusion of the 'American Dream' they are going to have all kinds of trouble on their hands.
The belief that you can better your circumstances through hardwork & education is one of glues that holds us together as a nation.

And there are people it has always been pretty untrue for like those living generation after generation in the ghetto. But yea, while they still have more opportunities, it's the middle class now, at risk. There are TONS of things our politicians are doing wrong!!!! We bailed out bankers rather than homeowners!!! I'm a renter and have never had an unaffordable home loan in my life. But come on, bailing out the bankers versus homeowners, I know which one would have been fairer (not the bankers). We continue to fund several wars and semi-wars, meanwhile tons and tons of people in the country are unemployed. UP FRONT we committed to the bail outs and the wars, now we don't have money for anything that might help the ordinary person economically. It's like buying a Porche on a 20k a year income and continually saying to the landlord "sorry can't pay rent, I'm totally broke, I already COMMITTED to the Porche see .... and I can't get out of it now" (that is exactly the argument we make for the wars). Meanwhile there has been a very deliberate transfer of money to the rich in the last few decades which doesn't help anything. Ok, maybe some degree of that is just the result of global capitalism, I won't say none of it is, but to the extent that the WHOLE global economy has been backstopped by the U.S. Fed, uh no, it's not just the invisible hand either. I'm not sure what would help economically at this point. A new green WPA? I'm don't know ....

[ApatheticNoMore]

Individuals are supposed to be infinitely flexible in responding to job markets these days too. So your manufacturing/real estate/whatever career has gone away. Be flexible, bend but don't break, find a new career. So ok say you have this mental flexibility down pat. So retrain.

But there's all kinds of what economists would call "transaction costs" in actually retraining. The ability to easily slip from one thing to another is not AT ALL facilitated, the wheels are more rusty than greased. Several transaction costs:
1) ever increasing barriers of entry to new fields. Oftentimes these barriers to entry are VERY deliberately built. When you need more and more advanced degrees just to enter the same field even when that field seems to be in some shortage, you know you've tripped on a real barrier
2) ever increasing costs of education, yea switching careers is a lot harder when you run up tens of thousands in debt every time it happens. And you are supposed to switch careers what 7 times in a lifetime. Oh yea just take out college debt seven times in your lifetime,that sounds like a reasonable plan!
3) inability to get classes at public schools, which are the only real way to avoid the massive debt of #2. But if you can't get the classes you need to switch in a timely manner where is the economic flexibility to switch to new labor markets? Education as a means of gearing a workforce to economic changes actually make sense. Education for a liberal arts broad perception of the world may make some sense too but probably should be apart from the former. What doesn't make sense is education as a means of ever accelerating barriers to entry (more and more advanced degrees to do the same thing).

Which really brings me to: our economic problems aren't just the structural types described above where a worker's field went away. Sure this applies to some of the unemployed, like real estate agents. But way way deeper fundamental problems exist, as in there just aren't enough jobs period!

[Gina]

The Republicans' prime objective is return to power. And the best way to do that is to do whatever they have to in order to keep the economy bad. In 2010 they were elected on the promise of 'jobs, jobs, jobs' yet they have done absolutely nothing about that. They are more interested in blocking whatever the president wants, even if they are things they formerly endorsed. Mitch McConnell clearly stated that his main goal was to keep Obama a one-term president - in other words, Republicans first, country be damned.

They would rather have the country go down the tubes in order to be elected than anything else. It is that simple.

I speak as a still-registered Republican whose Grand Old Party has been pulled out from under her by the power hungry lunatic fringe. And, yes, I'm not happy about it.

[iris lily]

... In 2010 they were elected on the promise of 'jobs, jobs, jobs'...

I disagree. While that may be what you think happened in the election, that's not what I saw.

Taking the bloated federal government down several pegs is what the fall elections were about. In my group of Republican friends we don't talk about the Republicans creating jobs, although certainly an environment that promotes business growth would aid that.

I personally don't expect the gooberment to make "jobs jobs jobs" and if they are, they aren't doing what I want them to do, they would be acting like Democrats.

[Alan]

If everyone is so frickin' concerned about Family Values why don't they (whoever 'they' are) all REALLY focus on getting their BEhinds to the negotiating table and create jobs or at the very least an environment that will lead to JOBS FOR OUR FAMILIES.

The thing is, government cannot create jobs (other than government jobs that depend entirely on the private sector to support), it can only try to perpetuate an environment where the economy can grow which leads to jobs.

The real problem now is that we have a government which is anti-business. It has expressed an interest in inhibiting the economy through it's desire to regulate, to make energy more expensive, to keep employers guessing about what the long term cost per employee will be, to seize more and more money through taxation, making the prospect of off-shoring more and more likely for those businesses that can.

If you are interested in improving your prospects, your best bang for your buck would be to kick all the progressives out of government. They won't be happy until they've equalized the playing field for everyone down to the lowest common denominator.

[poetry_writer]

Individuals are supposed to be infinitely flexible in responding to job markets these days too. So your manufacturing/real estate/whatever career has gone away. Be flexible, bend but don't break, find a new career. So ok say you have this mental flexibility down pat. So retrain.

But there's all kinds of what economists would call "transaction costs" in actually retraining. The ability to easily slip from one thing to another is not AT ALL facilitated, the wheels are more rusty than greased. Several transaction costs:
1) ever increasing barriers of entry to new fields. Oftentimes these barriers to entry are VERY deliberately built. When you need more and more advanced degrees just to enter the same field even when that field seems to be in some shortage, you know you've tripped on a real barrier
2) ever increasing costs of education, yea switching careers is a lot harder when you run up tens of thousands in debt every time it happens. And you are supposed to switch careers what 7 times in a lifetime. Oh yea just take out college debt seven times in your lifetime,that sounds like a reasonable plan!
3) inability to get classes at public schools, which are the only real way to avoid the massive debt of #2. But if you can't get the classes you need to switch in a timely manner where is the economic flexibility to switch to new labor markets? Education as a means of gearing a workforce to economic changes actually make sense. Education for a liberal arts broad perception of the world may make some sense too but probably should be apart from the former. What doesn't make sense is education as a means of ever accelerating barriers to entry (more and more advanced degrees to do the same thing).

Which really brings me to: our economic problems aren't just the structural types described above where a worker's field went away. Sure this applies to some of the unemployed, like real estate agents. But way way deeper fundamental problems exist, as in there just aren't enough jobs period!

I agree. I wonder what would be a real workable way to get more jobs. All of the crap we buy is made overseas. We just peddle it. Not sure of what a real solution would be at this point.....

[Spartana]

I agree. I wonder what would be a real workable way to get more jobs. All of the crap we buy is made overseas. We just peddle it. Not sure of what a real solution would be at this point.....

Yep. It would be nice to see a manufacturing base come back to the USA but don't think it will happen because of cost. Too expensive to manufacture here (wages, environmental protections, etc...) so don't see that happening...ever. The US is going the way that most every country in history has once it shifts from producer to consumer - a steady downhill trend economically.

[LDAHL]

The "Death of American Manufacturing" is a bit of a political urban legend. We still produce close to 20% of the world's output with about 5% of the world's population. We have seen probably a permanent decline in manufacturing employment, as much due to increasing productivity as foreign competition. Clearly, this isn't going to be a great century for low and semi-skilled workers.

I've often thought that trade protectionism is to the Left what creationism is to the Right: a really dumb idea fervently clung to by an influential minority that makes the whole movement seem a bit silly.