…that left out almost everybody.
It’s the worst since the Depression. For the same reasons. Because the same economic ignorami are in charge.
7 thoughts on “The Recovery”
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…that left out almost everybody.
It’s the worst since the Depression. For the same reasons. Because the same economic ignorami are in charge.
Comments are closed.
But don’t you know Rand, that’s not the Democrat’s fault. It’s all those greedy capitalist fat cats. If only we raised the minimum wage to 50% higher than the highest it’s ever been in real terms before, that would solve all problems!
😉
~Jon
For my company this year is the recovery. My guys went 6 years between raises, 7 between bonuses, and stuck with me anyway. Construction is hot around here at the moment. Our current problem is getting qualified help at higher starting wages than 7 years ago.
Are you going to be able to get back into rocketry? You haven’t remarried, have you? 😉
I’m hoping so, but it seems like every time I thought I was going to get going again something has come up. So I’m a bit gun shy about saying that I am getting back in. I feel like I was on the verge of being able to make real contributions about five years ago, about the time the bottom finished dropping out.
Not yet. I might as the woman I’m dating now is far more on the same page with me in almost everything than my ex.
“More than five years after the official end of the recession, the Public Religion Research Institute finds, only 21% of Americans believe the recession has ended.”
Amazing considering the recession ended a couple months into Obama’s first term. For Five years, Obama has been able to fool the country we are still in a recession in order to excuse his “emergency” policies.
My view is that once there was substantial, rapid global trade after the end of the Second World War (more or less established by the 70s), then the decline of US labor and its wages was inevitable. Meanwhile capital didn’t share in the decline and IMHO actually increased in value. So those who owned considerable capital in the developed world got richer, which would be the rich while those dependent on labor for their wealth got poorer. It doesn’t require me to project any evils on the rich, that’s just what happened and continues to happen.
What I think is the real tragedy or perhaps farce, is the wriggling on this hook, such as constructing elaborate, costly social safety nets or heaping regulations on businesses in order to force them to keep jobs. One would think that making labor more expensive in the developed world would be widely viewed as being highly counterproductive given the above global trade dynamic. But no, it is rationalized that people have earned all these benefits and they’ll pass laws to that effect, even though it makes the situation worse.
My view is that the median wages of developed world labor will stabilize at some point, probably a multiplier of global median wages. Whether that multiplier is greater than 1 remains to be seen. But I think most of these programs greatly weaken the premium that developed world labor might otherwise be able to command.
This is a rather zero-sum-game POV. You’d almost have to believe nothing new of any value has been created since the end of WWII.