But what about the rest of America. Do they still have good jobs? Are the number of good jobs growing in this country? Well, it seems that there are problems there also. We already know that wages for most workers (the bottom 90% of Americans) have lost a significant amount of buying power because raises have not kept up with inflation over the last 30 years or so. Now there is evidence that the "good" jobs in this country are disappearing.
The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) looked at the jobs situation, especially what is happening with good jobs. They used a pretty loose definition of what a good job is -- paying $18.50 hour (about $38,000 a year), having an insurance benefit (even a poor one with high deductibles), and having some kind of retirement plan.
Now one would think the percentage of good jobs (as defined above) would have grown. After all, the average GDP per person in the United States grew from $28,643 in 1979 to about $46,904 in 2010 ( growth of slightly more than 63.75%), and the percentage of workers with a college degree has climbed from 19.7% to 34.3%. But that is not what has happened. The percentage of good jobs has actually gone down.
According to the CEPR report, the number of good jobs has dropped from 27.4% of all jobs in 1979 to only 24.6% of all jobs in 2010. This should shock most people (who seem to think the majority of jobs in this country are good jobs). That is just not true. Even by the minimal standards set by the CEPR, less than one in four jobs in this country can be considered good jobs -- and the percentage of good jobs is not growing, but shrinking.
This is not something that can be fixed by giving the richest Americans more tax cuts (and Romney and his Republican cohorts want us to believe). In fact, it was caused by the Republican economic policies in place since the Reagan administration. It is no wonder the middle class is starting to disappear in this country. It would have to, since the good jobs that created that middle class are disappearing (while low-wage, no benefit jobs are increasing).
The U.S. government needs to stop worrying about the rich (who are doing better than ever), and start trying to institute policies that will help the bottom 90% of Americans.
Part of the problem is simple arithmetic. GDP is growing at 5% while the population is growing at 8%, so you have a net loss per person right there. Add in that of the 5% growth, 2% of it has been used up in foreign wars for the last ten years (yes, ten full years now) so you actually only have 3% economic growth accommodating 8% population growth.
ReplyDeleteEver since the post-WW2 boom we have been increasing our standard of living and increasing the gap between our standard and that of the rest of the world. We have assumed that at some point the rest of the world would catch up with us when they were able to. Not once did we ask if the world could support our standard of living world wide. It cannot.
Now not one but many nations and areas are challenging us for standards to match ours and the world's capacity is balking. The world economy is reaching limits due to resources and physical limitations. We still think we can go back to what we enjoyed and the rest of the world can "make do" with what's left, but the rest of the world is not accepting that proposition.
The other part of the problem is that we flatly misunderstood what a "global economy" means. We thought it meant that the whole world is ours to exploit. We are finding out that it means that we must actually compete with the rest of the world on many levels, and the only level on which we know how to do that is militarily.
I agree entirely that we should be doing something about creating good jobs, and that has nothing to do with taxes on anybody. We should be creating conditions in which Russian corporations (and German ones, and Chinese ones, etc) find it advantageous to build factories here because of our transportation, availabliity of reliable power, water and sewer, pool of skilled workers, availability of training resources, etc. We have none of those resources which would make us competitive in the world labor market, and we are not even talking about providing them. Instead we allow our infrastructure to deteriorate while we discuss yet more tax cuts.
I agree with almost everything you have said here. But note that GDP per person (that is, increased productivity) did increase, and was almost completely gobbled up by corporate management instead of being shared with workers as in the past.
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