Business & Tech

Notes on the Economy

Some brief thoughts on our sluggish economy and the failure of policy makers to understand its impacts.

The United States remains mired in an economic morass, despite the proclamations from economists who are supposed to know better.

Yes, the stock market has rebounded. And yes, corporate profits are up. And yes, gross domestic product has grown.

But average households have lost income over the last year, one in six Americans remain unemployed or underemployed and the jobs that are being created remain low-paid service-sector jobs.

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There are some interesting possibilities on the horizon—a push to create jobs in the alternative-energy sector, for instance—but these remain down the road.

And now that we have divide government—divided between corporate Democrats and corporate Republicans—we are not likely to see the kind of stimulus we need to pump money back into the economy, money that is needed to create jobs.

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To listen to some in the political world—both at the state and national levels—it is the fault of workers that they are having trouble in this economy. To read deeper into their ugly rhetoric, there are deserving and undeserving poor, there are people we shouldn’t be helping. This is nonsense, of course. The vast majority of people would rather be working at a decent-paying job than receiving the paltry amount they might get from state and federal unemployment benefits--$500 a week is not a lot, and most of the unemployed who get benefits qualify for far less.

And to listen to too many—including the president and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke—we are done with stimulus, anyway, and have to start looking at our fiscal problems. The solution? Deep spending cuts. The solution? Dangerously short-sighted and likely to make it impossible to put America back to work.


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