Budget talks: This is getting nasty

Sorry, but you don't get off that easy, Boom. It's a terrible response because it's so meager compared to what I wrote. Your response wholly ignores, for one thing, my contention that our economy relies on bad consumers - folks with a lack of personal responsibility. It relies on drug addicts - thousands of people have terrific jobs, often six figures, because of the crime that blooms out of drug addiction. It relies on the stupendously irresponsible notion of nursing homes - a booming industry just robbing and fleecing the elderly of their savings to force them onto Medicare - that has also created hundreds of thousands of jobs. The music industry is built on peddling smut, corruption and wasteful spending. In the big picture, there is nothing responsible about buying a giant SUV for two people - even if you can afford it - because it incrementally drives up gas prices/dilutes the oil source. And so and so on.

Beyond that, their lack of personal responsibility helps define yours. Is not murdering someone a sign of "personal responsibility." I suppose, but nobody calls it that. It's called "not being a murderer." If, suddenly, everybody became as personally responsible as you wished, not only would you lose the ability to say they're not, you'd lose your own traditional definition of responsibility. And they'd gain a sense of righteousness about what they deserve for their responsibility.

Let us say, for example, that everybody wanted to get a college degree. And they were willing to do all the hard work to obtain it. This wouldn't happen, of course, but your use of the phrase "personal responsibility" connotes that it should happen.

We already know the result: The value of a college degree would plummet to that of a high school diploma and a new standard for education - a Master's Degree - would be set. So what then? Millions of people with a pretty good education and no place to use it. Those millions start asking pretty legitimate questions like: <i> Hey, if I did everything right, how come it didn't get me anything?</i> It's like the economic version of the wronged spouse question: <i>Why did my spouse cheat on me?</i>

And when too many people start asking that question, Boom, hey: That's a bad thing for you.

 

Awesome immigrant story, with a twist:

 

Piers Morgan interviewed WILL.I.AM and Dean tonight.

Will gives an unexpected, but insightful answer:

 

I guess Will hasn't been watching the last 10 years.

 

"All I know is that the people that create jobs are companies, right?"

Who would have guessed that Romney and WILL.I.AM had so much in common?

 

Save us, Job Creators!

 

Bluster and Bullshit, yes . . .

Sounds like a vaudeville act.

IS a vaudeville act.

 

The rest of the story is even better. They eventually moved back to Africa, but their son, the prince, snuck away with his servant and moved back to New York...looking to find his bride. He took a job as a mere janitor at a knockoff fast food restaurant and set out to find true love. It is an enchanting story. He had many battles, including against the evil heir to a hair treatment empire, but found his true love.

 

The sharpest (in my view) of the offshores now has PArry favored slightly over the Mittster for the GOP nom . .. 7-4 on PArry . . . 2-1 on Plasticman.

 

If you had a company making widgets, but nobody who wanted a widget, would the company create jobs?

Point: There is supply AND demand and it's clear that the current economic problem is demand related. You can supply something, but people are afraid to buy it.

The serious discussions are in how to reduce the output gap, as in how to reduce unemployment. There is an argument that the unemployment rate is cyclical and there is an argument that it is increasingly structural. If you accept either argument, the solutions tend to involve government intervention of a sort.

If you believe it's cyclical, then the consensus is stimulus and that's been discussed.

If it's structural, then it's investing in education -- the argument being the average unemployed person does not have the skill set to meet the requirements of high-demand jobs in medical and education fields, areas where there is still growth. In the 1990s, a lot of unskilled workers who lost jobs in manufacturing were able to land in retail and construction. Now, low-skilled workers may be finding their skills irrelevant to where demand is. It doesn't matter if you've built houses for 20 years, if you don't have a state license to do medical coding, you can't have any of those available jobs (but if Sears was hiring, they'd probably take you).

The second part of the "structural unemployment" issue is geographic. People with negative equity in a home in a depressed market are less likely to pick up and move to a place where they might be in demand. If you're sitting in a market with double-digit unemployment and you're in a house that's lost value to the point where you'd have to walk away from it and take a loss and a credit hit, you're going to stick around that market for as long as possible to look for a job to avoid foreclosure and all the ramifications that come with it. If this was 2002 and you lost your job and felt like you could find one somewhere else, you'd sell your house in a heartbeat, pocket the equity and move. That is far more difficult now.

 

It may come, too, to the point where certain fields stop pretending the bar to work in it is so incomprehensibly high that it takes certain, hard-to-find workers to inhabit it.

 

Well look at this, a new green energy battery plant built with millions in investment from federal and state stimulus money. Maybe government does create jobs after all!

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2011108120396

Oh, and the reason people are in trouble financially has less to do with debt than with wages that have been cut or jobs lost altogether.