Remember that Barack Obama is a communist. Or did they say he was a socialist? Whatever. He is bad for business. The Dow Jones industrial average, however, briefly topped 15,000 for the first time ever.
The new job numbers are out for April. The unemployment rate is 7.5%. The economy gained 165,000 jobs in April. The Economic Policy Institute has more.
For some reason (and maybe you have to be a Conservative to understand it) Conservatives continue to jump up and down about Benghazi. Fox News continues to try to make this into some Watergate scandal, but there’s no there… there.
We received surprising job numbers last Friday. The unemployment rate dipped to 7.7%. The economy hired 236,000 workers last month. I will continue to argue that we have to do better. Over 9 million Americans are still out of work. We need to create 9 million jobs just to get back to where we were in 2007. These jobs numbers are good, but we need better. Also, this jobs report comes out before the cuts of the sequester. I suspect, over the coming months, these jobs numbers will begin to fall.
Just a couple days ago the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a new high. Remember as you’re reading this that Republicans have told us that Obama is bad for Wall Street and bad for business. (Psst, corporate profits are up.)
Washington, like a punch drunk fighter, keeps swinging at the wrong target. Deficits are not the problem. The problem is a lack of jobs. The problem is a stagnant wage. The biggest problem in the United States is the fact that the middle class is drowning in quicksand. They are simply not getting ahead. Until we fix this problem, America is going to be stagnant. (more…)
Over the last 30 years, we’ve been told that we needed to “unleash the beast.” What that was holding back Wall Street were all these regulations. Once we broke down those barriers capital will be free to flow. So we slashed taxes. We cut regulations. We cut import and export taxes. We broke down the barriers between insurance companies and investment companies and banks. We allowed banks to take on more and more leverage. As promised, Wall Street took off. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose to heights never dreamed of before. Huge corporations were raking in record profits quarter after quarter, year after year. But there was a price for all of this Wall Street prosperity. The moral contract between American companies and the American worker was broken. American companies used to have some sort of loyalty to the American citizen. Don’t laugh. They did. Frank Abrams,Chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey said in 1951, “The job of management is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly affected interest groups… Stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.” This would lead us believe whatever was good for business was good for America and vice versa.
Over the last 30 years, we’ve noticed that this is no longer the case. Now, because of rules and regulations, companies have incentives to ship jobs overseas. Companies have the ability to make millions of dollars by opening manufacturing plants, not here in the US, but overseas in Malaysia, China or Mexico. Billionaire Ross Perot, while running for president, addressed this topic head-on.
The question is, how do we fix this trend? How do we make the American economy and big business work for the American people again? On one hand, we’ve been told that all the changes that have gone on over the last 30 years have been good, that they simply haven’t gone far enough. We need to lower taxes even more for big business. We need to cut corporate taxes. We need to remove payroll taxes. We need to unleash the beast… even more.
This seems to be completely nonsense. Corporations are sitting on billions of dollars right now. I don’t understand why giving them more money will give them incentive to invest here in the United States. It seems to me that unless we change the rules, giving them more money will encourage them to invest more money overseas. Labor will always be cheaper in Malaysia and other developing countries. Big business has told us that they’re willing to play labor arbitrage with the American workforce. So, giving big business more money will be simply that – giving them more money. More money will not equal better behavior or more American jobs. Until we understand that throwing more money at Wall Street will simply be throwing more money at Wall Street, the American people will not get ahead. We need to train Wall Street. We need to enact rules and regulations that help the American worker.
By ecthompsonmd|2011-08-30T07:35:59-04:00August 30th, 2011|Economy|Comments Off on That Huge Sucking Sound is Jobs Being Exported
