The Unemployed Will Remain Grounded in 2010
Posted by Michael A. Kamperman on December 29, 2009
The objective of this blog is to advocate for the unemployed and find a macro-solution to returning those willing and able to work to decent jobs. I am strategically using a three-pronged approach which includes analyzing the most recent economic reports to gain insights into the outlook for unemployment, putting forth creative solutions that can improve economic growth, and holding Congress and the current Presidential Administration’s feet to the fire to prod them to do all they can to improve the potential for the unemployed to find meaningful full-time work. Most of the time it seems my message falls on deaf ears. Yet I know there are many out there like me who feel passionately about finding a way to restore the American dream to so many families who are suffering. I think we all know someone who is unemployed through no fault of their own. Most of us couldn’t say that two years ago. Yesterday I found a visual image of the pain many of these people feel when I saw the movie Up in the Air. In the movie George Clooney works for a firm that professionally fires people for large employers. It shows person after person being confronted with the horror of losing their job. These individuals feel dismayed, betrayed, and frightened for their family’s economic future. Since I am not a brilliant writer of prose I will simply highly recommend you see this movie to heighten your insight into the number one tragedy facing Americans: unemployment.
In the movie George Clooney’s character spends a lot of time flying. Unfortunately, the 2010 outlook for the unemployed is that they will remain grounded. There is no wind coming from Washington to lift their wings. Economic growth remains anemic and yet Congress and Administration are more concerned about the federal budget deficit than they are with providing enough stimuli to the economy to return the unemployed to work. And the Federal Reserve actually seems intent on ending quantitative easing in the near term. They all appear to believe the economy will magically return to growth on its own despite extremely tight credit conditions and an over built housing market. Sadly, they also appear content with the status quo and the concept that some pain now is necessary to provide creative destruction. Herbert Hoover and his advisers felt the same way and believed the same things.
President Obama has the power to make a real difference in the lives of the unemployed. He can lead our nation out of this economic morass and return the legions of the unemployed to dignified jobs. But he has to feel passionate about the issue. It can not be just another thing on his to do list. He needs to feel the weight of the unemployed on his shoulders. He needs to feel their pain. If he took on the greatest challenge of his Presidency with passion he would see success transcends political partisanship, personal friendship, and his pre-conceived notions about what his Presidency would be about. It is about jobs whether or not he is willing to rise to the challenge. If he is serious he will quit playing the blame game, he will fire Summers and Geithner, and he will jettison his notions about what America cannot do. Rather than preaching to us about the limits of government he will extol the wonders of the American spirit. He will ask employers to hire people. He will ask employers how the federal government can ease their burden to put people back to work. He will ask for Wall Street to fund real innovation rather than financial gimmickry. It starts with finding a new Presidential adviser unlike Larry Summers who believes the greatest economic innovations in America include the electric light bulb, the telephone, and the computer and not generally accepted accounting principles.
Jamie Holts said,
I found your site on Google and read a few of your other entires. Nice Stuff. I’m looking forward to reading more from you.
PT Murphy said,
this article is pure rubbish! you have no grasp of reality. i don’t have time to go through each item…just this example
“Economic growth remains anemic and yet Congress and Administration are more concerned about the federal budget deficit than they are with providing enough stimuli to the economy to return the unemployed to work.”
Are you seriously referring to the Democratic Congress / Obama regime? Can you make this claim with a straight face?
Badtux said,
Asking employers to hire people is a non-starter. Employers will hire people when they have sufficient demand to merit hiring people, no sooner. It simply is too much trouble to hire people you don’t need to hire — you have to put out advertisements, there’s round after round of productivity-sapping interviews as you have your team interview candidates, and so forth. It isn’t going to happen even if government offered to pay the full salary of your new hires for an entire year. That’s just how business works — even when we had the money to do new hires, we did it only reluctantly and only if demand absolutely merited it because the costs of locating appropriate candidates, interviewing them, etc. were significant in and of themselves.
Businesses are not charities. Either government has to directly create demand to hire people (via stimulus), or has to directly hire people itself. That’s the only way to get employees hired. There’s things we could do to prevent employees from getting laid off that would be valuable to keep things from getting worse — see the Japan and German experience there — because it’s a lot cheaper (in terms of impact upon the business) to keep someone unnecessary on but with his salary subsidized by the government, than to go out and find a new hire. But I think that’s the most we can expect business itself to do, if there is not an increase in demand to justify increased hiring.
Of course this is the whole problem with depressions. You can’t increase demand unless people have jobs, but people can’t have jobs unless there is demand. The Great Depression ended because of a massive upswing in demand caused by government stepping in and becoming a massive consumer in and of itself (via all the war munitions and supplies that it was buying to prosecute WWII). Even FDR’s massive (by current standards) works programs and jobs programs were insufficient in and of themselves to provide sufficient demand to end the Great Depression. But President Obama does not appear to be even a peacetime FDR, much less a wartime FDR…