Monday, October 04, 2010

Jobs, jobs, jobs

Mort Zuckerman with a good analysis of American job growth, or lack there of..............

Those with high school diplomas have an unemployment rate of 9.7 percent, compared with 5 percent for those with at least a bachelor's degree. Even recent college graduates have suffered. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, job offers to graduating seniors declined 21 percent last year and are expected to decline as much as 7 percent more this year.

The headline unemployment number underplays the disaster. The 9.6 percent quoted does not reflect those who have stopped looking for work since mid-2008—that would give a rate of over 11 percent. Private incomes remain about 5.4 percent below the level of the third quarter of 2008, a dramatically bigger drop than in any previous postwar cycle, when private incomes never declined at all.


As I continually say, I'm not a conservative for me. I'm a conservative for average working stiffs who need good value add jobs to make it.

It's too bad that our politicians can't grasp that every time they make it more expensive for businesses in this country to locate a plant (via environmental regulation, minimum wage laws, employment mandates, taxes, etc.,) it just gives a company more motivation to manufacture out of the country.

The usual response from liberals is to offer up protection tariffs for out of the country goods. This never works. Why? Let's use the example of computer manufacturer. Assume President "Progressive"decides to put tariffs on imports from domestic companies. All that does is make for more expensive products for the American consumer.

That manufacturing facility may be exporting 60-70-80-90 percent of it's product to other countries. As a result, there's no incentive to move that manufacturing facility to the US to compensate for protection tariffs on such a small segment of business.

But what do I know? I was never a community organizer.

Read the rest here...........

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yep. Tariffs. Socialism's swan's song to populists. Again, tariffs work great in the static economy that exists only in the the minds of "learned" ivy league professors. (Also where there is no difference between Econ 101 and Sociology 102 and PoliSci 103.)

But in the real world you hit the nail on the head Gordon. Tariffs make foreign products more expensive. A lib will say "But see, the system works. Domestic products are competing against higher priced goods, and fetch a higher price and that funds better wages.".

Ok Mr. Lib. But the workers will need a higher wage to afford this higher cost of goods resulting from tariffs. So it it's a wash for the working stiff, or it could be worse. The important point is that you have lost control over the economy, which you never had anyway. Plus you have possibly provoked punitive tariffs the other way making our products more expensive. The law of unintended consequences always wins.

Oh and someone remind Zuckerman he voted for Obama. How did someone so gullible get to be a billionaire?