Most American's can't afford a $1000 emergency [1].
Wages actually went down last month [2]
78% of Americans are living Paycheck to Paycheck. [3]
Nearly half of all Americans are low-income or in poverty. [4]
1/5 of children in USA are living in poverty [5]
I want someone to explain to me how this is a "good economy". I keep hearing it. It's total nonsense. I'm glad WaPo is bringing up that workers are still struggling despite these claims of a "strong economy".
[1] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/most-americans-cant-aff...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/15/for-t...
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/most-americans-live-paycheck...
[4] https://kairoscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Poverty-...
You can finance an enterprise with debt because it may produce income, and the debt will be repaid. But financing consumption with increasing debt is... dangerous at best.
(I agree the economy still isn't good for many people.)
In a truly booming economy people, bodies, matter more than skills. Skills can be trained after employment. I would expect companies to be paying more regardless of background. Any lesser pay for new people would/should be balanced by greater pay to retain trained people. None of that is happening. Wages are up a tick here and there, but not substantially. It will be booming when I see wages growing as a percentage of profits, when companies start tightening profit margins to retain people.
I don't have a solution. I just see that I know plenty of people who have GREAT degrees, are very intelligent and are working in a field where their success is more defined by who they are then how they were educated. I think whatever solution we do have, needs to take a look at both the economy as well as the education system and how we prepare our young for a life in the workforce. Because at the end of the day that's what we're doing, we're educating our young to be able to step into our economy and profit.
Again, I don't know the solution. Regulate the number of graduates within a certain degree field? Regulate jobs so that we force jobs to accomodate the degrees? Unionize alternate jobs so working at walmart / factories becomes profitable again? I don't know I just worry about what my children will do when they enter the economy and how will they stay in the middle class.
Stop providing loan guarantees for all students regardless of the marketability of the degree they've chosen?
Full stop.
Need-based public aid (whether it's the recipients financial need or societies workforce need, or both) should be grants, and there should be broad opportunities for public civilian service that provides service-based grants not based on specific need, too. The former should have payoff considerations, the latter should not.
Educators are effectively trying to project 12 years out and try and guess what the market will demand so that they can provide the minimum skills necessary to provide a modicum of middle-class life.
I went from a D high school to a straight A student in college. I found the freedom to choose to study what I am interested in ( Computer Science ) extremely liberating. I found the respect shown by the faculty to the students refreshing compared to my high-school. I found that being able to leave, take a nap, and then come back for my next class much more tolerable. I found that not being locked in a building for 9 hours a day freed up time to actually study and get your homework done.
Basically, I discovered what everyone else already knew: Current schooling is intended to keep kids in child-jail while their parents are working. Most schools do not have the resources to cater to bored gifted students, so we are cast aside with the understanding that "we'll be fine" while sitting through remedial classes where we have to read out loud because some of the students in the classroom are illiterate.
People claim college is a waste of time? HA. HIGH SCHOOL is four years of my life WASTED that I will never get back.
Let students set their own pace for education. Have them take responsibility for their own lives and future at a younger age. Let the children out of child jail.
I'd like to go back to a system where we look at what the job actually requires, and set the level there. Then educate people to that level. In this way we aren't allowing colleges to tell us what level we need to educate people to, but instead letting it become a hybrid.
The required education for your basic job should be free. But I also don't want to write a blank check for people to go to college for the college experience. I don't think that's necessary.
The idea of there being too many jobs that require degrees (but really don't utilize them) is touched on, and the proposed solution is for positions to not be allowed to ask for degree status. Instead, they would have to test for aptitude. The whole article is worth a read.
>Levi was laid off from her job at a law office during a merger in early 2015, and has struggled to find long-term work. In late 2016, she filed for bankruptcy."
How do you go from director at 59 to filing bankruptcy in fewer than two year after losing your job? Fiscal irresponsibility
This is a very entitled and selfish statement. The act of simply existing is very expensive in the USA, and if you have children or have unexpected medical bills that can be tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands, you can easily eat through all of your savings very quickly and not be able to pay back debts I'm sure they could pay before they were laid off.
Someone who lives a lifestyle one typically associates with someone who's employment can be describes as "own office, secretaries and assistants, along with titles like “director” that spoke to her decades of experience" will become impoverished if they lose and do not quickly replace that job on any continent. It's not just a US thing.
It doesn't take a huge imagination to realise the unexpected could happen, especially at that age. If you have had a reasonable career in a well paying job then it is irresponsible not to put something away for a rainy day.
After seven years, we had never really had two incomes, only one.
So when we had a kid, all of our expectations were built on one income. We maintained those - my wife has been a SAHM now for almost three years. She's going to go back when he starts pre-school one or two days a week, but she'll be choosing satisfaction over money, and only to keep skills relevant (she still gets job offers). If I ever lose my job, she can make a call, get a job (she's privileged in her field), and pick up 80% of my slack. We did this so that we never have to be too worried about my team scaling down.
It helps me sleep at night.
Or you know, fiscal responsibility, but a health issue or two in the house, and there goes your money...
To assume financial irresponsibility is to grossly misunderstand the issue.
https://www.fool.com/retirement/2017/05/01/this-is-the-no-1-...
And we should subsidize vocational training to a greater extent so that students aren't forced to take on financially crippling loans.
There’s no credit given for having a tidy business with steady profit. Instead you have to have “growth” and other this-quarter-must-be-better-than-last-quarter-or-else crap that “investors” want.
Simple example: The real, measurable costs of pollution - illness, polluted drinking water, etc - are externalized and so companies doing said polluting are "profitable." Would they still be profitable if those costs were not externalized? I suspect not.
Similarly I suspect there are externalities not being accounted for, for self-interested reasons on the parts of those collecting the profit, when assessing which types of work are profitable or not.
Please define what "making full use of it" means, without referring to profit.
Because without that definition your sentence doesn't actually say anything.
The only way to become an owner of a company is by being an employee. Essentially, all companies become co-ops. Investment of capital would happen through long-term relationships with banks, not through selling pieces of the company off to creeps who want outrageous returns at the expense of the employees/customers.
Instead of short-term gains, people now focus on 10, 20, and 50-year plans. Employees can democratically elect their leadership (or any other internal system can be set up).
The stock market and public ownership in general seems like an incredible waste of resources and focus.
What US currently lacks is the entrepreneurs who would come up with new products and services and then employe the unemployed, old people etc. But given the restrictions on immigration of highly skilled individual this is going to be tough to achieve.
The problem with the second half of your comment is its multiple applications of the magic dirt theory, in that somehow there exists a magic dirt in some countries that grows great entrepreneurs who are also magically forbidden from success in their own lands, yet supposedly magic dirt in other countries produces the opposite effect of people who cannot create business while in the conditions for great success. And somehow the solution to this magic soil fertilization issue is to take a solution that works for 1 person, such as moving around the world, and scaling it by 7.6 Billion to move the entire world population to Silicon Valley. The exact biochemistry is also mysterious, in that moving people around is implied to be a perm fix, although its more likely that moving people from "where X is broken" to "where Y is broken" will merely result in a larger quantity of "where Y is broken" people after a short amount of time, essentially re-enacting the slave trade to harvest a perpetual supply of human capital. Or maybe its a weird varient of old fashioned imperial era colonies complete with mercantilism. Move all the unemployed orange growers from Florida to Alaska, the only economic result will be a larger number of unemployed orange growers in Alaska rather than FL. Likewise there is no number of experienced profitable Maine fishing boat captains adequate to import and create a lobster fishing boom in Nevada, South Dakota, or Wyoming. Problems that don't scale have to be solved at the root of the problem, rather than brute force. On an individual basis, of course its nice when immigrating entrepreneurs work out, but for a variety of reasons it's not a scalable or long term solution to the very large scale overall economic problem.
That pretty much describes most of humanity, resource extraction to landfill with a brief stop off in our living rooms.
Taxes should be lower for the poor who would thus spend more and keep the economic engine running and create jobs.
Taxes should be much higher for the rich so that that money is used by Govt to do infrastructure work (create jobs) or pay down debt (and thus provide services and create jobs).
Lowering taxes for the rich just allows the rich to seek investments that will increase their own wealth, not necessary creating jobs (Some VCs are an abberation to this).
Some of it's just failings of a two party system. You vote for the one you like better, but given a binary choice it's a fairly non-specific vote.
Whatever the candidate says, fact check it and display a few important impacts to people directly. Economic is the easiest. Another good one is jobs, taxes, quality of life, debt, inequality.
For example I see that there is one graph with part-time, full-time graph. The full time employment has increased rapidly while the part-time graph remains the same. How is that possible ? Also, sharing economy is a new thing where a lot of people who would be "unemployed" in past are now doing part time work. A lot of work can be done online today staying at home and hence more people might have taken up part time work.
Another graph shows how part time and full time wages have grown and it claims part-time wages have been stagnant. The graph does not show that.
-- “I’m overqualified for these jobs, but they don’t think that I would be happy to do them,” Corcoran said. “I’m not finding any interest in a 60-year-old guy with gray hair and, honestly, kind of a limited shelf life.” --
Aren't these people actually the perfect candidates for part time experimental work positions where you could fire them easily ? (In almost all countries old people have hard time finding new employment)
Also, being forced to take on a massive amount of debt just to have a chance to get a certain job makes that job less valuable overall. A company can still boot you out in less time than it takes to pay off debts so you’re really trying to find continued employment to justify an investment such as having to move or obtaining a degree. And of course you might acquire new debts while paying off the older ones.
These situations tie the hands of so many, and that’s not a “strong” economy. If there’s no truly disposable income, you’re essentially expecting people to set aside their basic needs to raise your stock price.
“When he first started working iron, Hartnett was making about $43.90 in today’s dollars. On his last project, he made $16.93.”
What I'm curious about these statistics is: how do the statistics track the self-employed?
Seems to me the gig-economy is not about part-time jobs but about part-time self-employment.
So, if you are self-employed and you pay your taxes, from the government's point of view you are OK. But that doesn't mean you are profitable or making a living wage.
In IT, if you are 'benched' the employer pays you regardless. But a 'benched' self-employed person is basically an unemployed that is burning through cash paying taxes, health insurance, etc.
These statistics are tracked to a pedantic level of detail by the BLS. You can get numbers of people by industry and zip code and earnings bucket and quarter for most categories of self employment going back to the early 1980s. Moreover, unemployment isn’t mean to measure if people are getting a liveable wage. It measure if they’re getting any wage. The problem you cite is an issue, but it would quickly resolve itself into unemployment as the cash stores ran out.
Indeed, at some point the money runs out and that will become actual unemployment, but it will show up in statistics with a rather long delay or not at all.
In the mean time, you have people doing literally nothing while on paper the economy is overheating.
Of course, I'm sure it's a small percentage of the population... so probably not very relevant.
There's this. This doesn't exactly back up the claim - there are a lot of reasons people might not be participating.
In other words, you began your research with conclusion already in mind, and then looked for a way to present this data to show this conclusion.
Excellent statistical work. That's exactly how such research should be done.
