02.12.11
Posted in Extremism, Permanent Fail at 10:06 am by George Smith
Krugman breaks out the GOP recommendations for budget cutting. It’s called Eat the Future:
WIC 1008 million
Food for Peace 544 million
NOAA 450 million
NASA 579 million
Energy efficiency and renewable energy 899
Science 1111 million
Nuclear nonproliferation 648 million
Federal buildings fund 1653 million
Homeland security administration 489 million
FEMA, various, around 1.2 billion
EPA clean water and drinking water about 1.8 billion
Community health centers 1.3 billion
Centers for disease control 900 million
WIC is nutritional aid for pregnant women and women with young children; let’s cut that, because the damage to the nation from malnourishment is a problem for future politicians. NOAA is weather and climate — hey, what we don’t know can’t hurt us. Nuclear nonproliferation — well, we probably won’t feel the pain of a terrorist nuke assembled from old Soviet fissile material for a couple of years. FEMA — well, how often do hurricanes hit New Orleans? CDC — with luck, by the time plague hits someone else can be blamed.
Contrast the cuts for science and homeland security.
Since we know the GOP despises science, it’s a natural for them. It cannot, of course, cut all funding for science since this would not only destroy many universities, most government agencies including the Department of Energy and the National Institute of Health but — most importantly — private sector arms development, too.
The homeland security cut is trivial, as one might expect, a 0.8 percent sliver from its 56 billion 2011 budget. And there is found humor in that the GOP wishes to cut more from “nuclear non-proliferation.”
However, the GOP wishes to cut 25 percent from the FEMA budget, since that agency’s aspect of homeland security is, well, you know the story.
In BAD, Paul Fussell wrote in 1991:
Bad ideas are those that are palpably unsound, like constructing a building from the top down, or trying to run a car with a pill in it. Some people can always be persuaded to embrace such notions, but most would agree that except as the material of jokes, they are a waste of time. Bad ideas, on the other hand, are widely accepted and so familiar as to go largely unquestioned …
[Another bad idea]: … [disease], homelessness, poverty and drug addiction are justly punitive, and will probably go away if we do nothing about them.
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Posted in Made in China, Permanent Fail at 9:10 am by George Smith
Stagnant US labor market encounters rising number who “leave” unemployment rolls because they are permanently or semi-permanently severed from workforce.
Mike Konczal has started to answer the question from a Reuters news item today:
Since 2008, the American labor force — that is, the number of people either working or actively working for work — hasn’t grown at all, The Economist reports, looking at Labor Department numbers.
That’s not unusual during a recession, which typically leads some of the unemployed to become discouraged and give up looking for work, or to retire early. At the other demographic end of the labor market, recessions can also prompt some young people to go to school instead of entering the workforce, The Economist explains.
But things usually turn around during the recovery. This time, however, that’s not happening: Since the Great Recession officially ended in mid 2009, the “participation rate” — the share of the population in the labor force — has continued to decline, especially among the young.
But the problem appears to have deeper roots. In the 1990s, the labor force grew by 1.3 percent a year. Last decade, that figure dropped to 1 percent. And the Congressional Budget Office predicts that over the next decade, it will grow by only 0.7 percent.
Taken together, the slow growth of the labor force and the low participation rate mean that the offiical [sic] unemployment rate, now at an already high 9 percent, underplays the actual rate of joblessness even more than such official figures usually do. That’s because the official rate doesn’t include workers who have grown discouraged and stopped looking for work–and that number appears to be unusually high.
The obvious irony here is the case of Egypt, illustrating what happens on the extreme end of the curve, with its decades-long entrenched system of throwing away its human capital for the sake of a looter upper-class holding the reins of power.
Question: What happens when all manufacturing and jobs have gone overseas and there are less and less who can even raise a demand for the cheap stuff?
Answer: Like Walmart, you build overseas or diversify into things like drug sales to the elderly, which the US government underwrites, or white-knuckle banking and financial services for the poverty-stricken who still need to buy a few sticks of clothing. Or like Target, you turn half the store into a supermarket because people still must buy food, which the government can help pay for with food stamp programs.
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Posted in Made in China, Permanent Fail at 8:55 am by George Smith
Latest giant product recall, faux-American company in Woonsocket, RI:
Baby Monitors recalled due to strangulations
Everything the company peddles is made in China.
Without discussing the poor designed product, the incident is just another illustration of why the US labor force is stagnant, except for high-end goods for the wealthy and arms manufacturing.
Since there is no obvious or easy way to reverse this without a radical overhaul of the country, one that’s not politically possible, it is now permanently embedded as part of a bleak landscape.
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02.10.11
Posted in Permanent Fail at 10:29 am by George Smith
Abstract from the paper “The Stagnating Labor Market,” by Jayadev and Konczal:
Key findings: the number of people out of the labor force who are no longer trying to find a job is steadily increasing, as the normal mechanisms for reentry have collapsed. It’s now more likely for the unemployed to drop out than to find a job — the first time this has happened as far back as data can be found. Jayadev and Konczal find that underemployment has risen due to a lack of aggregate demand, not a mismatch between workers’ skills and available jobs.
The graph, taken from here and reposted all over the blogosphere, illustrates unemployment decreasing, in part, because the many of the unemployed are leaving the labor market — illustrated by the rising red line. It would seem a symptom of entrenched failure in the US economy, with no obvious sign of “winning the future.” It also looks like it could actually be the primary driver of “decreasing” unemployment statistics.
(Go to the original post for a larger version.)
Writes Mike Konczal:
The percentage of unemployed who will drop out of the labor force is increasing, gaining over those who will find a job. This is unique in the post-World War II economy — and only getting worse.
More at Pine View Farm where Frank refers readers to a journalist at the Philadelphia Inquirer, one tasked with interpreting the bleak figures.
Related: New category added — Permanent Fail — superseding Stumble and Fail, now inadequate to the task.
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