Interestingly, the argument I had with Dean Baker over makework jobs is a mirror image of the debate over the poverty rate, in which conservatives "prove" that there's no such thing as poverty because we really spend quite a lot on poor people, and liberals point out that it still sucks to be poor.
Again, this is fundamentally a debate over what we're trying to measure. If the poverty rate is supposed to be a measure of how many people are trying to live on the puny incomes that fall beneath the line, then of course conservatives are right: it doesn't measure that very well. We provide the poor with various forms of aid, from food stamps to transfer payments to Medicaid, that top up their purchasing power by 50% or more. (I've heard it convincingly argued that things like Medicaid and housing subsidies mean that the legally poor in New York are in much less danger of missing a meal than the lower middle class.)
But the poverty measure also measures something else: how many people in the United States are unable (for whatever reason) to secure the basics of life for themselves without substantial government aid. If we include government aid, we are in danger of obscuring that important figure, because we will be measuring variations in government aid as well as variations in the underlying economy.
It is true that (just as with government work relief) the government funds are not entirely exogenous--at any level of benefits, some people on them prefer welfare to work. Rationally so--the poor can face marginal tax rates that approach 100% on extra income, when you factor in the loss of benefits like housing, medical care, and subsidized childcare. But the change in the "pure" figure from year to year is still telling us something about the distribution of wealth in the economy that adding in benefits will obscure.
Most of the people who have been angrily emailing me have treated the question of make work jobs as if it were a referendum on government spending. One can believe that the WPA was a good idea, and also believe that one should leave it out of the unemployment statistics when trying to estimate the extent of economic recovery. Similarly, one can be in favor of poverty spending, and still think it's important to know what poverty looks like before taking the spending into account.
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This sort of debate often shows up in Britain, where certain types of people are fond of citing the fact that the poverty rate in the US is higher than in the UK. My understanding is general statistics about poverty, at least in the US, are measured before government aid is added, whilst in the UK, poverty is measured with government aid factored in - thus showing a lower rate, but disingenuously.
But the poverty measure also measures something else: how many people in the United States are unable (for whatever reason) to secure the basics of life for themselves without substantial government aid.
This is true, but it doesn't vindicate the left in any meaningful fashion. They want to use the poverty rate to argue for more welfare programs. Which makes a certain kind of sense if the poverty rate is a measure of people who can't afford the basic necessities of life. But it doesn't make sense at all if the poverty rate is a measure of people who wouldn't be able to afford the basic necessities of life if it weren't for the welfare programs we already have.
The left essentially wants us to ignore existing welfare programs when deciding how much additional funding we should allocate for welfare. Which is just silly.
I would add, also, that the idea that welfare doesn't cure poverty--and in fact tends to create more of it--is an important one for libertarians and conservatives to emphasize.
The poverty line is not regionally adjusted (except for Alaska and Hawaii) and so measures... nothing. Wikipedia shows the current poverty line for a family of 4 at $21,200 for the lower 48. Does anyone seriously believe that $21k goes as far in Manhattan or DC as it does in rural Nebraska or Wyoming? Yet another example of idiotic federal one-size-fits-all-ism.
I think what upsets alot of us is that many Republicans are saying that ALL jobs created by the "stimulus package" are not "real" jobs, and some Republicans are implying, strongly, that no government jobs are "real". They also say that, since these jobs aren't "real" they shouldn't be counted.
We get upset because, you know, building roads where they are needed is real work, of benefit to society in the long run. Telling us that road building "doesn't count" if it's paid for by monies drawn during a Democratic administration strikes us a mendacious, at best.
Oh, and the people saying this are the ones who gave us 3T in deficit spending during the Bush years, and now object to any more deficit spending.
So here I am, a white middle class military veteran living in Virginia who will probably never vote for a Republican again. 3rd party, maybe, but not Republican.
So when you say that relief jobs "don't count", well, you get lumped in, fairly or not, with the people who created this mess.
Will either method make these poor people magically disappear? Will it make their need for assistance go away?
If not, I don't see the point of this post. Other than to continue to play politics with people's lives in support of a failed ideology that is. This reads as yet another gimmick to support "your side".
Also, you fool no one with your claim that excluding stimulus created jobs from employment statistics to get a "true" picture of any economic recovery after you've been arguing strenuously against this stimulus for the past three months (ever since those icky blue collars started lining up for cash). Its transparent.
Wiredog:
"We get upset because, you know, building roads where they are needed is real work, of benefit to society in the long run."
Absolutely. Making roads that people need is real work that should be counted. Making roads that people don't need, on the other hand, does nothing except artificially lower the unemployment rate. Perhaps that belongs in a separate category.
This whole debate reminds me of the housing bubble. No kidding. I can remember having long arguments with very educated otherwise smart people about the houseing market. They kept saying that a house could never be a bad investment. That home values would always go up. I told them they were crazy. That unless there was some underlying supply and demand factor driving it up, homes shouldn't be rising in value every year much above inflation and that any rise above that couldn't be sustained. Basically they though you could get something for nothing.
Now we have the government bubble. People are dead convinced that we can solve economic issues by just putting people on the government payroll. The underlying issues of where the money to pay those people comes from and what they will be doing to earn the wages don't seem to matter. All road projects are necessary and worth the money in the current world. All school or government buildings are worth the money and produce more wealth than it takes to build them.
Since we can't get something for nothing from our homes anymore, we now are going to get something for nothing from the government. If we just spend a few trillion dollars that we borrow from ourselves and give it to people building things, everyone will be okay. People never learn.
I'm quite certain that when you exclude governmental aid, people will demand that "We do something".
If that something is making it easier for businesses to hire these people below the poverty line, that is good.
But generally that "something" will be to give benefits to the people below the poverty line.
In that case, it's best to be very upfront about how much benefit they already get.
In the case of unemployment, it's a measure of how business is doing. If you want a statistic for social engineering outcomes, maybe its not perfect.
But being a person on the private labor market I sure as hell would like to know how easy or tough it is to get a job. And likewise, being a person that also hires people I want to know how likely it is I will find someone.
If I know there is 8% unemployment, I'll act a little differently than if the government gives me a rose picture of 2% unemployment because 2 million people are picking up trash and digging ditches.
If you deflate/inflate the amount of people searching for jobs by including those that are in make-work programs by the government it doesn't offer much help.
I saw your bloggigheads debate and my husband and I want to remind you that the reason the WPA does not exist is because WWII eliminated the need for it by generating jobs and other type of work for the unemployed.
Megan,
One of the reasons a lot of people of all political stripes get mad at you when you make these kinds of arguments is that they are uncomfortable with complexity. It's not enough to support a policy or a philosophy -- they must not tolerate any acknowledgment that there are good-faith objections or intelligent challenges to said philosophy.
You often make observations about what the fundamental SHAPE of a debate is, while pointing out the what the strong and principled arguments for each side are. Inevitably, this draws out the knee-jerkers and partisans on both sides who simply cannot abide the notion that political debates are rarely between the "good guys" (me) vs. "bad guys" (them). Some people -- and in this vein I see very little daylight between most leftists and religious conservatives, both of whom find comfort and righteousness in perpetual outrage -- simply like their moral and philosophical world to be as simple, cartoonish, and black-and-white as possible.
I only write this in acknowledgment that there are pressures in the world of punditry against the kind of intelligent and thoughtful reasoning you display 99% of the time on this blog. Please do not stop providing this invaluable content -- even if all the emotional (and perhaps financial -- see Huffington, Ariana) incentives are to feed the gaping maws of partisanship and ideology.
I would argue that measuring both how many people need assistance, and how people are benefiting after getting assistance (and how many have unmet needs) is absolutely essential in helping to meet their need for assistance. How else would you try to determine how much assistance is needed, and whether or not it's helping?
If you're trying to determine whether or not to spend more on poverty programs than currently, surely the best number is how many people still have unmet needs after the current spending. But on the other hand if you're trying to determine whether fiscal stimulus is needed, then since Keynesian economics says that it will only work when the economy is under full employment, surely you want to exclude people on welfare or makework jobs when determining if the economy is at full employment.
MikeM,
"Other than to continue to play politics with people's lives in support of a failed ideology that is. "
When you say this do you also include yourself, who plays politics by taking wealth from others, who have worked for it, and giving it to others doing things that the person who you took the money from likely doesn't want done for them?
I can think of no more failed ideology than the one that says we should take wealth from productive people, and invest it in activities that generate a lower rate of return than those that a productive person would otherwise choose to invest those funds in.
"Making roads that people don't need, on the other hand, does nothing except artificially lower the unemployment rate."
And allow people to put food on the table. And bring home a paycheck. And buy things to get the economy moving again. Yeah, I totally see your point - that doesn't sound like a job at all.
By your logic the president is unemployed, he'll be out of work in 4 to 8 years.
Concerning make-work vs. real work:
The debate is seems to me to be about the distinction between measuring the number of people earning a wage through whatever means and those doing "real" work. I can see how these are both important numbers, but I think that measuring real work while excluding make work to be highly problematic.
Digging a ditch and then filling it back in while getting paid by the government is clearly not real work. What about the "x" number of employees at an arbitrary state's Department of Motor Vehicles? What about a peace-time soldier that spends his or her time re-cataloging for the nth time an equipment stockpile? What about a private contractor hired to build the new fill-in-the-blank in Senator Y's home state? What about Senator Y? At lease in some cases, aren't we really just providing work for a less than successful litigator?
I see the importance of measuring real economic activity, but I think that we have a problem measuring real employment that is similar to the problem of measuring GDP: when a spouse stays home to provide homemaking and child raising services, it is not counted as a service, but as soon as that same person hires someone to do the same job, it gets counted as part of our economic output.
In sum, while make-work jobs may not be what we focus on, the official unemployment rate also fails to accurately measure economically productive employment as it counts plenty of people as not unemployed that are either working part-time, have given up looking for work, were self-employed and now can't find work, or in permanent, non-productive employment.
"I saw your bloggigheads debate and my husband and I want to remind you that the reason the WPA does not exist is because WWII eliminated the need for it by generating jobs and other type of work for the unemployed."
That is true. But what they were doing was making bombs and rifles or out killing people and getting killed. I don't think that is a very good idea. If you look at what happened in World War II, we did a couple of things. First, we stopped people from buying consumer goods. You couldn't buy cars and refrigerators and the like. Second, we put a lot of people in the military and started making a lot of military equipement. Second, we got people to take their wages from the military and their bomb making jobs and save them in the form of war bonds. I mean there wasn't much else you could spend your money on during the war. Then when the war ended you had a huge pent up demand for consumer goods and a ton of pent up savings to buy them with. This caused the economy to boom, much to the surprise of the Keynesians of the day who thought the economy would go back to depression with the end of the war. It is an interesting story, but none of the war time measures that drove the post war boom are practicle or desireable today.
"I can think of no more failed ideology than the one that says we should take wealth from productive people, and invest it in activities that generate a lower rate of return than those that a productive person would otherwise choose to invest those funds in."
Think harder - its the ideology that says we should completely unfetter markets, deficit spend to our eyeballs, follow every Wall Street gimmick to make a cheap buck while all the while fellating the powerful and rich with sweet sweet tax cuts. And hey, if you can manage to pat yourselves on the backs while doing it by calling yourselves the "productive people" all the better.
AKA - the Republican ideology. The people behind the 21st century depression. Seldom has an ideology been discredited so thoroughly and quickly. Spare us your lectures.
A few things:
In the early 1980's, I was a data-base administrator for a "progressive" state with liberal welfare benefits. Then, as now, the biggest problem with welfare was the two party system. We have achieved this perpetual state where one party says help the helpless, the other says not too much. The result is a trap that's nearly impossible to climb out of. So we offer aid, but not enough to let a single mom get her life together and lift her family out of poverty and into self sufficiency. This, more then anything, creates generational dependence.
Right now, the growing pace of homelessness should be a serious concern. In the early 1980's, there were children living in cars. We're going to see this again. If that isn't poverty, I don't know what is.
But to measure poverty by purely financial terms is also a useless measure. Poverty is other things. It's not reading to your children, not teaching them the importance of civil participation, not equipping them to balance a checkbook or cook a meal. It's leaving them alone when they're too young to be alone. It's not caring for health problems when they first become obvious. It's not knowing McDonald's isn't a balanced diet.
Measuring poverty is much more complicated then dollars handed out or earned. It's lifestyle; and I know some affluent people who lead impoverished lives.
It's time to drop the umbrage about "real" jobs or "real" work or "real" povery. Our gracious hostess is asking about the correct metrics to provide us with valid information about the state of the economy to inform political decisionmaking. There is no implied judgment of the moral fiber of government employees or the usefulness of (now unemployed) bankers.
It's as though she were discussing the merits of measuring power factor vs. peak-to-peak voltage in electrical distribution, and a bunch of people showed up, acted offended, and said "What, you don't think a ruler measures something real? I have a ruler, and it measures just fine! What an elitist moron!"
"There is no implied judgment of the moral fiber of government employees or the usefulness of (now unemployed) bankers."
Clearly you're new here. All these people want to do is make value judgements about how nobody deserves help because they're lazy and don't deserve it. Peruse the threads, including this one. They don't exactly try to hide their elitism.
Excluding anybody who finds work under a future stimulus plan is just laying the groundwork to say "See! I told you this wouldn't work!" and then press for more tax cuts for the rich. Its kind of pathetic, but kind of hilarious too.
that sound you hear is the oxygen slowly being let out of the republican party.
we all feast at the government teat. all we are really arguing about in this country is how low long certain groups get to feed.
Mike M writes: "Clearly you're new here. All these people want to do is make value judgements about how nobody deserves help because they're lazy and don't deserve it. Peruse the threads, including this one. They don't exactly try to hide their elitism."
First, Rob is obviously not new here. Secondly, don't confuse the commenters ("these people") with Megan.
"Excluding anybody who finds work under a future stimulus plan is just laying the groundwork to say "See! I told you this wouldn't work!" and then press for more tax cuts for the rich. Its kind of pathetic, but kind of hilarious too."
Then Rob, why don't we just give everyone in the country a GS15 100K a year goverment job? If the government can create jobs by a stroke of a pen, why shouldn't they and good ones to? Please explain why under your theory my plan won't work? Don't you want everyone to make 100K a year?
"Secondly, don't confuse the commenters ("these people") with Megan."
Is this the same Megan compared her ordeal in not getting a plum consulting gig in Manhattan after graduating from business school and having to rough it by not buying new clothes to being a laid off auto worker in Detroit?
Yeah sorry - she gets included as an elitist as well.
@John
Your argument is based entirely on the premise that there is no demand for government jobs, hence they're "manufactured" somehow and real. In which case we should all just have one.
This argument doesn't really hold up to scrutiny does it? Policemen are government employees. Firemen. DoD clerks. Future stimulus employees are going to be upgrading schools, making government buildings energy efficient, building roads and railroads. Are you seriously of the opinion that this is all anyone in the world ever needs to do.
Its not a zero sum game whereby we're either 100% private or 100% public employees.
But then again you know that already. Right?
MikeM,
If there are no policeman, then no it is not a zero sum game. We need police and we need government employees. But at some point, we cease to need those things. If the value of the last policeman hired was the same as the first, why can't we just make everyone cops and give them a good pay check? Of course we can't because we only have use for so many cops. We only have use for so many government employees.
That of course is the hard part. Everyone who thinks stimulus is such a great idea assumes that their stimulus is the right one and that all of the things done with the money are needed. Why is that the case? Government, if you count state and local, already consumes something 40% of every dollar. Just what is government not doing that it should be? How large does government need to be? How is it that we can have a federal government that consumes nearly one dollar in every five, yet still have an infrastructure in need of repair? Doesn't that tell you that we already are wasting a lot of money in government? How does wasting more help matters or even if the stimulus doesn't waste it, running up debt by continueing already wasteful programs help?
"Clearly you're new here." Mike M - Saying this to The Rob Lyman causes it to bounce off of him and stick to you.
Mike M -
Your posts on this site can be predicted with almost 100% accuracy. They inevitably attribute all kinds of nefarious motives and moral failings on those who disagree with you. That makes your rhetorical job a lot easier, because then you get to argue with a cartoonish strawman of your own creation rather than do the hard work of actually arguing on behalf of your own philosophy. It has the added side benefit, I'm sure, of helping you to feel morally superior, regardless of what kind of person you are in real life to those around you.
To argue that tax-funded make-work should not be counted in employment figures is to simply point out that to do so would obscure our ability to measure the fundamental health of the economy -- or what Megan calls "labor demand." This is a statistical/quantitative argument -- it says nothing about the inherent worth of any people involved.
If you think that is wrong, then make your argument. Answer the question: is it really full employment if we pay half of the unemployed to dig holes and the other half to fill them back in? Or, if it is more complex than that (and you and I both know it is), then how do we measure and distinguish what creates value (like perhaps infrastructure and renewables) and what is truly make-work?
Accusing people who are asking and debating these questions of calling unemployed people "lazy" or "undeserving" is wrong at best, and dishonest at worst. It contributes nothing to the debate, and it also makes your own position less persuasive (if you would ever actually state what your position is, rather than just rail at imaginary straw-man villians who like to hurt widows and orphans).
I say this as somebody who actually does live off of the value and wealth created by taxpayers (and who may become unemployed very soon).
Mike M writes: "Yeah sorry - she gets included as an elitist as well."
No doubt that I consider Megan an elitist myself, but your statement, "All these people want to do is make value judgements about how nobody deserves help because they're lazy and don't deserve it," is a pretty tendentious take on a sober, innocuous post about the nuances of an economics statistic.
@Staash
Sorry, but the claim that nobody here makes value judgements on those who are due to receive aid (or even those who disagree with their worldview) is just false. UAW workers have been compared to everything just short of devil worshipers because they were asking for some bailout money around the holidays. The rage over somebody working the line in Detroit who could be making $50K a year was palpable. Government workers aren't considered legitimate either, presumably because they don't have MBA's. If this crowd ever stopped making value judgements I'd be impressed, to imply nobody here ever makes them is just c-r-a-z-y
And yeah - I know this guy isn't new here. That's what's so scary. Its as if you guys live in an alternate universe, one in which things right in front of your face are invisible.
In Mike M's defense, Megan is a terrible elitist even if she is right about the stimulus and right about the nature of government created jobs. In the end, Megan did not have the courage to act by her principles and object to TARP yet someone found them when it came to the autobailout. Ultimately, although I doubt even Megan admits this to herself, the difference between the trillion dollar tarp and the 50 billion dollar auto bailout was that TARP helped people like Megan and people Megan liked and the auto bailout didn't. Sad but true.
to imply nobody here ever makes them is just c-r-a-z-y
Who's implying that?
"is it really full employment if we pay half of the unemployed to dig holes and the other half to fill them back in?"
It depends what you mean. Yes, everyone has a job and is earning income and can now buy things in the economy. No, those jobs aren't going to be permanent. But the idea is that giving temporary government jobs now eases the liquidity crisis by pumping a lot of money into the economy, and therefore will boost the (non-temporary) employment rate in a year or two because businesses are doing better from all the hole-diggers' incomes and can then hire some of them when they're done digging holes. All the debate over which measure to use fundamentally ignores the point of what the stimulus is actually supposed to do, and if it won't do it, why not. And it doesn't help when you go on polemics against government spending and the welfare state.
can then hire some of them when they're done digging holes.
So I take it the stimulus bill as passed has a date on which they'll be done with the hole digging? Or did they not have enough paper to include that provision?
"Accusing people who are asking and debating these questions of calling unemployed people "lazy" or "undeserving" is wrong at best, and dishonest at worst. It contributes nothing to the debate, and it also makes your own position less persuasive (if you would ever actually state what your position is, rather than just rail at imaginary straw-man villians who like to hurt widows and orphans)."
Again - do you actually read these threads? Off the top of my head I can remember people accusing UAW workers of "making $50 an hour to sit on their ass and do nothing", and that was in the past two days. The contempt this crowd holds for their fellow citizens who aren't "their sort" is astonishing. I couldn't make up a more cartoonish elitist attitude if I photoshopped Megan's face on to a drawing of Scrooge McDuck.
No imaginary straw men needed - the greed and mendacity of a certain strain of Republican is laid bare for all who care to see it. Its the one redeeming feature of this blog.
"So I take it the stimulus bill as passed has a date on which they'll be done with the hole digging? Or did they not have enough paper to include that provision?"
Oh, come on, you're smarter than that. There's a certain amount of money in the bill. You award someone a contract to build a bridge, and when the bridge is built, the contract's over. When there's no more money to give any more contracts, no more jobs are created. The idea being that by the time that happens we're coming out of the recession and don't need that many government jobs anymore.
After watching that clip with Dean, I have to think that he's very slow-witted or (more likely) that he was being deliberately obtuse with his "huh, I don't understand what you're getting at" responses. Either case means that I haven't missed much by not reading his work, and that he frankly isn't worth reading or talking to. Hopefully your next Blogging Heads appearance will be with someone more intelligent and/or sincere.
Adam: I suspect that you're smart enough to know that they can always pass new "stimulus" bills to spend more money, and the pressure to do so will be considerable if this doesn't work, or alternatively if the bridge-building contractors decide that Robert C. Byrdistan doesn't have enough bridges.
"No imaginary straw men needed - the greed and mendacity of a certain strain of Republican is laid bare for all who care to see it. Its the one redeeming feature of this blog."
Oh give me a break. To most Dems who post on this blog, anyone who attends church is a fundie and exotic culture is someone who lives in Birmingham and eats at Olive Garden. Yes, Megan is an insufferable elitist. But she is that way mostly because being so is the only way to fit in with her lefty friends.
Mike M writes: "UAW workers have been compared to everything just short of devil worshipers because they were asking for some bailout money around the holidays."
What does this have to do with this specific post? It's as though you completely abandoned any pretext of relevancy in favor of launching into a wild tirade against "you guys". Who are "you guys", anyhow? Does that include those of us who favored the auto bailout?
liberals point out that it still sucks to be poor.
OK, sure, but that's largely a status issue now. The poor are clothed, fed, housed and generally even have TV, air conditioning, transportation, and access to the Internet. The poverty line today is close to the adjusted average income of the 1950s.
I can remember people accusing UAW workers of "making $50 an hour to sit on their ass and do nothing"... The contempt this crowd holds for their fellow citizens who aren't "their sort" is astonishing.
Gee, imagine wanting people to provide value in exchange for their status rather than having the government or unions hand it to them. I'm ashamed.
"I suspect that you're smart enough to know that they can always pass new "stimulus" bills to spend more money"
Of course they can. And if we're still mired deep in a recession in two or three years and another stimulus is needed and it's the right thing to do, it should be passed. But don't pretend this bill is indefinite or that it has any designs to be so, just because Sessions whines about socialism. If voters no longer trust Democrats on economic issues, then they'll find themselves without the votes for any future such issues, so it tends to work itself out that way.
And besides, Byrd will be dead soon enough. Baucusstan is the new hotness.
Sam said this:
"I can think of no more failed ideology than the one that says we should take wealth from productive people, and invest it in activities that generate a lower rate of return than those that a productive person would otherwise choose to invest those funds in."
This statement gives me an underlying feeling that certain people think of human beings no differently than they would a savings bond. I would like to think that there are things in the world that trump the "rate of return".
There are plenty of great arguments to make about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of our current system and the incentives it creates (or doesn't create), but to make an argument that the poor are undeserving of assistance because they represent a "poor rate of return" seems not only heartless, but nearly sociopathic in its callous disregard for the suffering of others and the utter lack of the sense of moral obligation to relieve it.
John writes: "Ultimately, although I doubt even Megan admits this to herself, the difference between the trillion dollar tarp and the 50 billion dollar auto bailout was that TARP helped people like Megan and people Megan liked and the auto bailout didn't."
Generally speaking, I think people's principles follow this type of reasoning rather than the other way around. That's not sad, it's just human.
@John
I was quite careful to say a "certain strain" of Republican as I'm fully aware how idiotic it is to paint an entire group with such a broad brush. That being said, I don't see how you can credibly deny that some extremely callous cruel and elitist people post the most disgusting things on this blog. I was shocked when I first started tuning in. Not much has changed my mind since then.
Tell you what, I'm going to start saving and compiling the various comments I read in these threads and haul them out again when this comes up next (as I know it will). At that point you can either refute the morons cluttering up this ongoing debate or excuse them somehow.
I for one am confident that I won't have to wait long to get a very long list going indeed.
Adam,
To assert that you have "pumped a lot of money into the economy", you first have to answer the question of where that money came from that employed the hole diggers/fillers.
So, where from?
"OK, sure, but that's largely a status issue now. The poor are clothed, fed, housed and generally even have TV, air conditioning, transportation, and access to the Internet. The poverty line today is close to the adjusted average income of the 1950s."
Besides, of course, the many millions of people without any health care, vehicle, or employment. They have TV and air conditioning and can afford McDonald's, so I guess we shouldn't bother doing anything about them.
Christ.
Mike M,
Ripping on the UAW and autoworkers is not necessarily elitist. My older brother is a maintenence tech for a company that supports the auto industry and a union steward. You will hear few people have worse things to say about auto workers than him. His reasons are that the UAW demanded outragous pay for little work and managed to bankrupt an entire industry and perhaps his own company. There are a lot of workers out there who don't have the gold plated benefits of UAW members and are pretty angry at having to pay taxes to support such. They are just as angry abou that as they are about paying taxes to support Megan and her fellow U of C MBA ilk who screwed up the financial sector. Wishing a pox on everyone's houses is not necessarily elitist.
Well, in this case (and Megan's) I opposed that. Also note that Moody's says that we're going to add over $3T to the US debt by the end of 2010.
Debt is predicted to go from 40.8% of GDP to 62.4% of GDP. The deficit is going to come close to 14% of GDP.
For all GWB's excesses, the debt only went from a low of 33% in 2001 to 40.8%. (And most of that a huge jump from 36.9% in 2007 to 2008, thanks largely to TARP but also the slowing economy.)
I suppose that $3.2 trillion in extra debt in two years instead of just $2.5 trillion in eight is the change we've been waiting for.
"To assert that you have "pumped a lot of money into the economy", you first have to answer the question of where that money came from that employed the hole diggers/fillers.
So, where from?"
It was printed, obviously. The government has that power. Considering the current risk of a deflationary spiral I really don't see inflation being a huge concern right now.
But, what's supposed to happen is higher taxes and less spending during good economic years so there's a surplus available for times like these so money doesn't have to be printed. Doesn't exactly work that way when you have Republicans in power though.
"The poor are clothed, fed, housed and generally even have TV, air conditioning, transportation, and access to the Internet. The poverty line today is close to the adjusted average income of the 1950s."
Exhibit A everybody. Clearly this person doesn't know any poor people, hasn't read a whole lot about poor people and resents the concept of poor people in general (note the condescending tone). He's certainly never experienced poverty himself as he sees it as some sort of subsidized vacation.
THIS is the ugly strain I refer to.
Where's the guy who said that soldiers walking down the street in San Francisco have more to fear than black people walking the streets of Birmingham. His wisdom is sorely needed right aobut now.
"I suppose that $3.2 trillion in extra debt in two years instead of just $2.5 trillion in eight is the change we've been waiting for."
Don't even try that. It takes deficit spending to avoid a complete collapse of the banking system and auto industry, and more deficit spending to get out of a recession. Maybe if we didn't have such massive deficit spending during non-recession years it wouldn't be required now.
But I think liberals would be happy to help fix some of that debt for you though by bumping taxes back up to Reagan's rates (capital gains particularly) and ending spending in desert countries. I'm sure you wouldn't disagree, right?
Adam,
So, if it is printed, why are we paying them to do make work? Why not just print an even bigger lot of money and send it to everyone?
That being said, I don't see how you can credibly deny that some extremely callous cruel and elitist people post the most disgusting things on this blog
Yes, yes, it's incredibly callous and cruel to ask people to work. /eyeroll
I've worked in manufacturing for a dozen years. It's not just the "jobs bank" where UAW workers do, in fact, sit on their asses getting paid to do nothing. I've seen guys in featherbed positions where literally all they is press one button twice a day (for 40-plus an hour) go on strike for better pay and benefits.
Clearly this person doesn't know any poor people, hasn't read a whole lot about poor people and resents the concept of poor people in general (note the condescending tone).
Not that such drivel even needs refutation, but for the record I paid my own way through two degrees working various jobs for less than ten bucks an hour. I lived in shoddy rooming houses and ate on $10/week at times. What's your tale of woe?
"So, if it is printed, why are we paying them to do make work? Why not just print an even bigger lot of money and send it to everyone?"
Bush tried that, if you recall. It turns out that when you mail everyone big checks in a bad economy almost all of them either save the money or pay down debt with it (80% I believe). So that's not really very useful.
Now, I suppose you could send everyone a check every two weeks that's enough to buy groceries and pay bills with. They wouldn't save that. But if you're going to do that, why not make them work 40-hour weeks producing things for it?
So, if it is printed, why are we paying them to do make work? Why not just print an even bigger lot of money and send it to everyone?
Because everyone doesn't belong to a group making large campaign contributions to Democrats.
Besides, of course, the many millions of people without any health care, vehicle, or employment.
Bullshit. They have Medicaid. Vehicles and jobs aren't a birthright, they have to be earned.
Rob Lyman posted:
Who's implying that?
See Rob, that would be one of his strawmen. You can usually spot them because once someone points out how ridiculous they are, he goes on to responding to other posters or bringing up new strawmen.
I suppose that $3.2 trillion in extra debt in two years instead of just $2.5 trillion in eight is the change we've been waiting for.
No, it's the hope we've been changing for.
THIS is the ugly strain I refer to.
Mike, please explain how TallDave is wrong.
I'd much rather be poor in the US in 2009 than 1959 or (shudder) 1809; frankly, I'd probably rather be poor in 2009 than, say, a middle-class skilled artisan in 1809 or even 1909.
"It's not just the "jobs bank" where UAW workers do, in fact, sit on their asses getting paid to do nothing. I've seen guys in featherbed positions where literally all they is press one button twice a day (for 40-plus an hour) go on strike for better pay and benefits."
Let's come to an agreement. People who press one button twice a day for $40 an hour are in jobs that don't need to exist. They should be paid less and do more work.
The other side of the coin is that people who work at WalMart are not paid enough money to live on, often have to use significant government assistance, get virtually no benefits, and are often in places that don't have other jobs available. They could probably use some kind of mass bargaining so they don't live awful lives.
"Not that such drivel even needs refutation, but for the record I paid my own way through two degrees working various jobs for less than ten bucks an hour. I lived in shoddy rooming houses and ate on $10/week at times. What's your tale of woe?"
You see this as a story of personal triumph. I see it as a failure of a country that millions of people have to do this instead of having college paid for them like almost every other civilized country. For every one like you there's many others that get sick and have to drop out because they don't have health coverage, or their condom doesn't work, or any number of other things that can push you off-track when you're living on the edge of financial disaster. So I don't think that situation should be anywhere near as commonplace as it is.
Adam writes: "But don't pretend this bill is indefinite or that it has any designs to be so, just because Sessions whines about socialism. "
Could you please provide me with at least one example where the federal government managed to contract? I'm not trying to be obnoxious here, I'd actually like to know.
"I lived in shoddy rooming houses and ate on $10/week at times"
I come from a single parent home in Florida where by mother made $30K a year and tried to raise three kids by herself. I put myself through school at FSU, got a degree. Stayed on and got my MBA. I'm a CPA and have since pulled myself up from my circumstances in life, in part due to government programs (i.e. Pell grantsm, financial aid, etc.) but mostly hard work.
I haven't forgotten where I come from. I used to live amongst those who try to scrape a living off $30K a year, the equivalent 25 years ago of $50K/year today. Its backbreaking and soul crushing. All these people want is a chance to work and raise their kids and not have to worry about how to pay the electric bill or feed the kids.
Your complaints seem petty and petulent in comparison. You bitch about whether they deserve what scraps your economic system has deigned to throw their way. You bitch about how they dare to request aid after decades of selling out their future. Most disgustingly of all you do this while advocating that the people who brought America's middle class to their knees continue to receive millions in bonuses.
This blog is a case study for everything that's gone wrong in this country for the last 30 years. You've allowed yourself to believe that you could do no wrong. You've cheered yourself on while you gutted our infrastructure. Now you want to apply the same rules and the same worldview as a plan is formulated to try and reverse years of neglect and outright class warfare.
You lost a seat at the table. If you're lucky those of us who have been paying attention will just mock you on blogs rather than start sharpening the guillotine.
Once again, a post about how to measure unemployment has devolved into an argument over the stimulus, or about Megan's elitism, and who is evil and who is virtuous.
But hardly anybody is trying to answer the question -- how should we measure unemployment? Should unemployment statistics measure the health of the economy or should it be a sort of misery index? And what are the implications of each metric?
Megan argues about "work" the way a physicist does -- "work" measures how much has gotten done. So if I lift a 200-lb weight above my head and then drop it and it lands in the same place, then I have, technically, done ZERO "work." I have expended energy and resources in terms of calories and heat and glucose and whatever -- but I have produced nothing of material value.
Dean (and some commenters here -- or so I presume, if they would quit making this statistical debate a moral one) argue that yes, "work" has been done. After all, If my goal in lifting the weight was to work my muscles and get in shape, then I would agree.
So what's the point of a job? Is it to perform a service that adds value to the economy? If that's the case, then the burden is on liberals to defend every federal dollar spent on the grounds that it is productive in the medium term at least, AND that it would be more productive than its opportunity cost (that is, what that dollar would have been spent on had it not been taken away and spent by the government). And conservatives would need to prove that all or most private sector jobs (and especially those most removed from the real economy) actually add value, especially now that there's a recession and people aren't spending money privately anyway.
But if the point of a job is simply to provide a paycheck for a worker, regardless of whether it adds value or not, then conservatives need to explain why it's wrong to create work artificially with government action. And liberals need to explain why, in this case, we should force people to work rather than just accept a welfare payment.
Of course, in the real world things aren't so clear cut, and government make-work is never completely useless, but it isn't ever going to be, on average, as productive as work created by a free individuals making free choices in a free market. Therefore, there is a good debate to be had on where and how much to spend. Unfortunately, liberals undermine their position by spending so much of our money on giveaways to their political constituencies. It's really grotesque comedy to watch Nancy Pelosi try to justify subsidizing contraception as a "stimulative" measure (economically, not physically). In turn, conservatives make asses of themselves when they refuse to acknowledge the multipliers involved with, for example, infrastructure spending.
Sorry for the long comment.
uy vey. The same story, the same lame commentators. Yancy Ward and Rob Lyman whose entries magically seem to appear at the same time are either:
1. Lovers
2. The same person
3. A coincidental doppelganger of lameness
Whatever they are, it sure isn't enlightening anyone. I wish they would stop polluting the public internet with their pathetic tripe.
"Bullshit. They have Medicaid. Vehicles and jobs aren't a birthright, they have to be earned."
You've never been on Medicaid, have you? Probably not, because it applies to "children, pregnant women, parents of eligible children, seniors and people with disabilities. Even under the broadest provisions of the Federal statute (except for emergency services for certain persons), the Medicaid program does not provide health care services, even for very poor persons, unless they are in one of the designated eligibility groups." So no, they do not have anything, and generally get no medical care except for dire emergencies.
As for the vehicle, for one of the tens of millions living in rural areas, a lack of a vehicle is often a significant hurdle to employment. I mean, we could have more public transportation, but I don't think you'd approve. I suppose your advice would that everyone who can't afford a car should move to cities with good public transportation.
The other side of the coin is that people who work at WalMart are not paid enough money to live on
YES THEY ARE. Did people not live on those incomes in the 1950s? Were those "awful lives?" You can easily live on Wal-Mart wages, you just have to do without some modern luxuries.
If you want those luxuries, then guess what: you have to learn a marketable skill. Welcome to the free market.
You see this as a story of personal triumph.
No, I see this as doing what I had to in order to buy things I wanted. Anyone can do it if they're willing to do the hard work. I got sick sometimes, but I went to class and work anyway. I didn't engage in high-risk sex or drug behavior. I studied while others partied. Etc.
Sorry, I don't buy this idea there's some poor underclass of doomed people who have no chance to get ahead, and who therefore are entitled to a large chunk of the fruits of my labors.
"You can easily live on Wal-Mart wages, you just have to do without some modern luxuries.
If you want those luxuries, then guess what: you have to learn a marketable skill. Welcome to the free market."
He means food by the way
Could you please provide me with at least one example where the federal government managed to contract?
The end of WWII.
And dogboy, Yancey is much more Austrian than I am. I just ask overly simplistic questions that nobody answers.
It was printed, obviously. The government has that power. Considering the current risk of a deflationary spiral I really don't see inflation being a huge concern right now.
Err, the Fed only buys notes if the public won't. That money is going to be coming out of the economy.
This is where your argument that direct "stimulus" payments don't work because people just save them is strange. Where do you think the government gets it's money from? Savings. There's less money to be lent to potential non-government debtors.
Even if you just get the Fed to just buy several trillion in notes, that inflation does the same thing. Lenders are less willing to lend.
There isn't any real way around this problem. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
But, what's supposed to happen is higher taxes and less spending during good economic years so there's a surplus available for times like these so money doesn't have to be printed. Doesn't exactly work that way when you have Republicans in power though.
Adam, it never has. At least not in recent memory. Even if there isn't any deficit spending for a number of years, we don't have a "surplus" available for future budgets if we have a massive debt. You're obviously and falsely conflating the two.
Furthermore, we haven't have a real "surplus"/ non-deficit year for at least 50 years now. Putting a budget to congress that's "balanced" or has a "surplus" is meaningless if appropriation bills and other unexpected spending occurs. The national debt has increased every year since the 1960s (and that's just as far back as I could easily look).
"And conservatives would need to prove that all or most private sector jobs (and especially those most removed from the real economy) actually add value, especially now that there's a recession and people aren't spending money privately anyway."
No they wouldn't. Private sector jobs are not depending upon government money. If they are not producging added value, they won't last in the long term. Understand of course that added value can be the good feelings of the people who donate to keep the job going, but it has to be something. Otherwise, the job won't exist.
"But if the point of a job is simply to provide a paycheck for a worker, regardless of whether it adds value or not, then conservatives need to explain why it's wrong to create work artificially with government action."
The point of a job is not just to provide a pay check. The point of a job is to provide a vehicle by which people's skills and efforts can contribute to the economy and be sychonized with other people's skills and efforts. Jobs are the very vehicles by which the economy creates goods and services. The paycheck is the just the evidence of that creation.
"In turn, conservatives make asses of themselves when they refuse to acknowledge the multipliers involved with, for example, infrastructure spending."
No, you make an ass of yourself by pretending that such effects have ever been established. Look no further than the work that has been done on publicly funded sports stadiums. There is an example of real government funded infrastructure projects. The research is unanomous that there is little or no multiplyer effect for these projects. At best the projects just move money around from one area of the city to another and from one group of people to another. They really don't have much of a multiplyer effect.
You've never been on Medicaid, have you?
My mom was on it when she got cancer. Ironically, it prevented me from receiving college aid because it was counted as income.
the Medicaid program does not provide health care services, even for very poor persons, unless they are in one of the designated eligibility group
You don't know what you're talking about. The groups are quite broad.
Adam, I must have missed a post or some nuance of your reasoning. You seemed to be one of the ones arguing that paying half of the unemployed to dig holes and the other half to fill them up was good stimulus b/c it gave them a paycheck to spend.
Now you seem to be arguing that paychecks for useless jobs are no better than just doling out the money for no work but doing it in the same bi-weekly fashion. Then you say "why not make them work 40-hour weeks producing things for it?" But how is hole digging and filling producing things?
I grant that there is prob. no literal hole digging and filling in the stimulus bill (though I can't say for sure not having read it or even heard of anyone who read the whole thing) but certainly infrastructure spending can easily approach that level of uselessness (witness Japan's paved lakes).
Also, to your point about it being temporary and only extended through more stimulus bills if needed, my impression is that much of the bill gives extra money to various already existing government programs. Is there some reason to assume that they won't count this money when arguing for how much they need to have appropriated next year and every year after? In other words, is there any reason to believe that the stimulus spending won't just become part of the new baseline when calculating increases?
(Remember, when discussing federal government spending, cutting the rate of growth is the same as actually cutting in absolute terms, so if this is in the baseline even trying to keep it at the same level would represent an enormous expansion from previous eras).
"YES THEY ARE. Did people not live on those incomes in the 1950s? Were those "awful lives?" You can easily live on Wal-Mart wages, you just have to do without some modern luxuries."
Um, no, they didn't. Assuming you mean adjusted for inflation, of course. The average person in the 50s who graduated high school got a salary sufficient to support a wife and two kids.
The average Wal-Mart worker now makes $7 an hour, 30 hours a week (they rarely get to work full-time because then they'd get benefits). That's $840 a month. I have lived on that, and it is not remotely "easy" or in any way pleasurable, and that's assuming you never have any medical/emergency expenses and put everything towards bills and the cheapest food possible while saving nothing.
To compare that in any way to the situation in the 50s is simply ludicrous.
"Sorry, I don't buy this idea there's some poor underclass of doomed people who have no chance to get ahead, and who therefore are entitled to a large chunk of the fruits of my labors."
And that's why libertarians will never, ever become a viable political party. Because the percentage of people who think that is less than 5% of the country.
The best way to track the success of your argument, TallDave, would be through obesity statistics. Because I'm guessing that the costs for our service-sector jobs, including jobs at WalMart are subsidized in ways we haven't accounted for.
They include subsidies to the corn/soybean industry, the pharmaceutical industry, education, health, justice. The segment of the population we're discussing are fatter, they have more health problems that need to be treated on an emergency basis, their children don't perform as well in school, they drive older, gas-guzzling cars, they spend more time in the legal system.
You can't measure poverty without considering these costs to society.
TallDave writes: "If you want those luxuries, then guess what: you have to learn a marketable skill. Welcome to the free market."
Alternatively, you could just vote Democratic and shakedown private industry. Welcome to American politics.
If you want those luxuries, then guess what: you have to learn a marketable skill. Welcome to the free market."
---
He means food by the way
Apparently you think the average family couldn't afford food in the 1950s.
This blog is a case study for everything that's gone wrong in this country for the last 30 years
Whereas the domestic automotive industry and the UAW, your favored institutions, aren't?
Are you drunk?
I'm not sure why you think you have so much credibility that you get to authoritatively dictate to everyone else whether or not they get to have a "seat" at the discussion.
Then again, when the entire purpose behind all of your arguments is to justify why your favored institutions deserve everyone else's money, it's not that surprising.
"The segment of the population we're discussing are fatter, they have more health problems that need to be treated on an emergency basis, their children don't perform as well in school, they drive older, gas-guzzling cars, they spend more time in the legal system."
Where is your evidence that that describes people who actually work at Wall Mart? Have you ever actually been in a wall mart? I have and the workers I see are a bit more complex than the elitist cartoons you are painting. Some of them are retirees looking for extra income. Some of them are students working part time. Some of them are wives and mother's who work there because the hours sync with their husband's hours so they don't have to pay for child care. Very few people who work the entry level jobs at Wall Mart actually live on just that salary. Moreover, no one stays in those jobs forever or if they do it is by choice. Most of them complete their education or otherwise move on to better jobs. It is an entry level job, not a perminant job.
Apparently YOU think food costs the same in 1950 as it does today. Even adjusted for inflation, that's just not the case.
But hey - keep going. People were doubting there were cartoonishly greedy people posting outrageous things on this blog right around the time you showed up and started posting.
Tell us more about how a Wal Mart cashier has a normal life in America if they just stop buying luxury goods.
Um, no, they didn't
Yes they did. Go look up the average income in the 1950s, inflation-adjusted, and compare it the 2008 poverty line.
The average person in the 50s who graduated high school got a salary sufficient to support a wife and two kids
That's because the average person in the 1950s lived in a much smaller space without modern luxuries. Your modern Wal-Mart employee is much better off.
Meanwhile the dueling going on between brain-damaged Staash and certifiable moron TallDave continues as well. Can't you guys find a job snaking toilets or something?
"Tell us more about how a Wal Mart cashier has a normal life in America if they just stop buying luxury goods."
Real easy. She lives with her husband who has a high paying job. She is retired and works there to subsidize her income. She works there because she is in college and needs to make some extra money. The list goes on and on. It is so obvious that you have never been anywhere near a Wall Mart or known anyone who worked there.
Here's a great video for Mike M and Adam.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvvuHREm5jg
Mike, I'll take your guillotine comment and raise you the rifle in my still warm and alive hands. It reaches and touches farther out.
This is not France. This is not Russia. I've seen the former and grew up in the latter.
Now about that Garand that Rob has mentioned...
As a former abstractor of government statistics, I find this whole debate kind of silly.
If you're including work-fare type projects in the unemployment rate, SAY SO clearly, and post separate sub-totals of other unemployment measures.
If you're not including work-fare type projects in the unemployment rate, SAY SO clearly, and post separate sub-totals of other unemployment measures.
But this is not about measuring unemployment so much--because we already publish these subtotals and methodology--it is about getting a number to make a political point. When politicians do this, they are always, always, always sure NOT to say what measure they're using clearly, and they never talk about other pertinent sub-totals.
Apparently you think the average family couldn't afford food in the 1950s.
He also thinks that 50k a year is "backbreaking and soul crushing."
That's well over half the working people in this country. At what wage is a life simply mediocre? 75k?
"Meanwhile the dueling going on between brain-damaged Staash and certifiable moron TallDave continues as well."
What?
Apparently YOU think food costs the same in 1950 as it does today. Even adjusted for inflation, that's just not the case.
Sigh. Food is MUCH cheaper in real terms than in the 1950s, because of 50 years of productivity improvements. Watch the video.
"Whereas the domestic automotive industry and the UAW, your favored institutions, aren't?"
Wow - the UAW came up with credit default swaps? They were behind bad residential mortgage loans too? Tax cuts for obscenely wealthy? Two wars financed by deficit spending.I mean yeah sure, clearly they were loudly advocating that we gut our infrastructure by shipping jobs overseas because they've always been behind that, but all this other financial chicanery - who would have thunk it?
"It is so obvious that you have never been anywhere near a Wall Mart or known anyone who worked there."
Oh right....damn that IS obvious. All the Wal Mart workers are people who are supplementing their income (presumably for luxury goods) and have husbands at home who make mad bank. How could I have missed that?
I'll have to tell my sister in law who works there to come home. I mean even though my brother is unemployed and they're struggling, clearly she has nothing to worry about!
Y
"Wow - the UAW came up with credit default swaps? They were behind bad residential mortgage loans too?"
Barney Frank and Chris Dodd had a lot to do with those and managed to get rich doing so. Do you have bad things to say about them?
You heard me Staash. Oh...and just remember: JESUS loves you but everyone else thinks you're an idiot.
http://www.boston.com/business/personalfinance/articles/2008/03/09/surging_costs_of_groceries_hit_home/
These people need to stop buying luxury goods too apparently.
Barney Frank passed legislation that required banks to give out loans without verifying income? He invented the CDS market and then grew it to 62 trillion?
Wow - that guy IS an asshole.
Wait - the legislation you're referring just incentivized giving a percentage of total loan portfolios to lower income groups? The banks just took that and ran with it, aided by a massively deregulated market? Then they bonused themselves on the phony performance?
Oh well, let's still blame Barney Frank.
"It is so obvious that you have never been anywhere near a Wall Mart or known anyone who worked there."
Having worked at Wal-Mart on more than one occasion (and now make over the soul-crushing 50k amount), have several friends who have worked there, and shop there regularly, I completely disagree with your conclusions. So I hope I have the relevant expertise to do so. You're basically arguing that it's ok to pay people $840 a month with no benefits and no hope of getting a union because some of the people working there are college students and older people, who can't possibly *really* need the money.
My guess, though, is that you live in a sufficiently wealthy area that a lot of people have other employment opportunities. Where I live there are LINES at the computer job terminal, and there aren't college kids in them.
I'd be surprised if the average WalMart worker got $7 an hour -- the federal minimum is currently $6.55, and it will be above $7 beginning this summer.
However, I would not be surprised if a new hire without experience at WalMart started at $7. Most people begin their first jobs somewhere close to the minimum wage. After that they either get seniority with that employer and move up the pay scale, or put the job experience on their resume and find something better.
That is, if they are working to become primary breadwinners at all. Many people aren't... there's a lot of room in the economy for jobs that provide second, third, and fourth incomes for households where the main earner can command quite a bit more. There are also plenty of part-time jobs that allow students, retirees, free-lancers etc. to pick up extra cash.
But ultimately, much of retail is low on the skill and productivity scales. It's never going to pay a great deal. That's the problem with basing the whole economy on it. You need some -- people have to go somewhere to get their stuff -- but letting it drive the economy is a mistake.
Wow - the UAW came up with credit default swaps? They were behind bad residential mortgage loans too? Tax cuts for obscenely wealthy? Two wars financed by deficit spending.I mean yeah sure, clearly they were loudly advocating that we gut our infrastructure by shipping jobs overseas because they've always been behind that, but all this other financial chicanery - who would have thunk it?
Did anyone on this blog come up with any of those ideas either? Hmm?
And, as someone who works in the domestic steel industry, we haven't "gutted" our infrastructure by shipping jobs overseas. That's nonsense. We've made roughly the same amount of steel since the 70s, but we've done it with less than 25% of the workforce in the early 70s. That demonstrates, clearly, that the jobs aren't being "shipped" overseas, the jobs are "lost" to increasing efficiencies. We generally call that "progress." If you measure it by jobs, well, then you ought to start complaining that we aren't producing that 100 million tons of steel a year with a 100 million blacksmiths.
At any rate, you seem to think that championing the UAW and the domestic automotive industry gives you the authority to dictate to everyone else what is and isn't a failure.
That's so absurd it's farce.
"That's well over half the working people in this country. At what wage is a life simply mediocre?"
Wow - you really don't know do you? I suggest you get your head out of your ass pronto buddy. Most people are not happy with where life is taking them financially. For you to feign shock at this fact speaks volumes about both you and your political movement.
"You're basically arguing that it's ok to pay people $840 a month with no benefits and no hope of getting a union because some of the people working there are college students and older people, who can't possibly *really* need the money."
Yes because they are better off with the job than without it. Under your system, you unionize and pay everyone whatever you decide is the proper wage and Wall Mart goes away or charges much higher prices. How does that help anyone? I worked lots of low paying jobs when I was in college and ones that were a lot worse than Wall Mart. But I was better off with the jobs than I was without it. Had people like you had their way, those jobs wouldn't have existed because you would have outlawed them as being exploitive. Clearly you moved on from Wall Mart and recieved needed cash flow when you had the job. Why are so intent on denying other people the opportunity you had?
These people need to stop buying luxury goods too apparently.
Apparently. From the article:
Adam,
I love the class warefare angle you are playing up here. Lets have a revolution and take all the stuff that the rich stole from us back. We can then have a giant lawn sale and use the money to pay off the national debt. After that, we'll have a big trowdown. All we need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and we'll be fine.
Wow - you really don't know do you? I suggest you get your head out of your ass pronto buddy. Most people are not happy with where life is taking them financially. For you to feign shock at this fact speaks volumes about both you and your political movement.
Wow, so not being happy that you aren't making more money means that the money you do work for is "backbreaking" and "soul crushing?"
Wow. One of these things is not like the other.
What words do you have left for the walmart worker making less than 12k a year? Is that "soul destroying" as opposed to the mere "soul crushing" of 50k a year?
"Wait - the legislation you're referring just incentivized giving a percentage of total loan portfolios to lower income groups? The banks just took that and ran with it, aided by a massively deregulated market? Then they bonused themselves on the phony performance?"
yes and when people said in 2003 that there was a problem with FANNIE and FREDDIE, Frank got up in Congress and lied and said there was no problem. All the while his boyfriend was getting huge bonuses from the two based on fraudulent accounting. They guy is nothing but a two bit crook. He should be in Prison.
Also, how did those banks go to town and make all of those bad loans and none of the regulators stopped them? Well, countrywide gave Dodd a sweatheart mortgage and in return Dodd got the regulators to lay off them. Dodd is a crook to and ought to be in prison as well.
But hey why worry about the truth or trying to go after all the crooks on this deal. Better to blame it on Bush and let Franks and Dodd clean it up right? If you are a principled liberal you ought to hate Franks and Dodd. They both took money from crooked banks and costs the tax payers billions. If you are just a Dem hack, you won't face that. Which are you?
"But I was better off with the jobs than I was without it"
Yeah but clearly you're better at denying yourself luxury goods.
Most people are not happy with where life is taking them financially.
And here we arrive at the real problem: someone isn't happy. Why aren't they happy? Because other people have better stuff.
Cry me a river.
"Under your system, you unionize and pay everyone whatever you decide is the proper wage and Wall Mart goes away or charges much higher prices. How does that help anyone?"
This is a gross mischaracterization. The workers get paid whatever they can bargain for. It's not exactly like a Wal-Mart strike is going to be effective. And they're not going to close a single store, because they'd still be profitable paying more. They just close any store that threatens to unionize right now to scare everyone away from doing so.
And no, I don't think they should be paid $15 an hour. I'm talking about basic dignity things like "stop working us 31 hours every week because you'd have to give us benefits if it was 32". Or "stop making us work unpaid overtime under the threat of firing". Nobody who works a full-time job should have to be on government assistance. Costco has quite good prices and pays their workers significantly more, with full benefits. What's the difference? Look at the amount of money the Walton family has. That's the difference.
In other news, I wonder what the response will be when I ask all my friends how they survive the "backbreaking" toil of making a "soul crushing" 50k a year. Considering the vast majority of them make less than that, some significantly so, I can only imagine the creativity of their responses.
I guess we're all a bunch of sadist because that "backbreaking" and "soul crushing" wage is something we aspire to.
TallDave.....I really appreciate your can do attitude.
The ballgame really isn't that important. I'd rather spend time with you.
Can't your mother stay another week?
Why don't you handle the remote, as long as I'm with you, I don't care what we watch.
Let me make dinner tonight.
"And here we arrive at the real problem: someone isn't happy. Why aren't they happy? Because other people have better stuff."
That could be it. Or they might be unhappy because they don't know how they're going to pay the bills next month. Or because their car is on its last legs and they can't afford to get to work once it goes. Or because they don't have health insurance and can't afford braces for their kid. Or because they know they'll never be able to retire.
Or, it could just be because the neighbors' TV is bigger. At least until last year.
@John
Yeah I'm not really into cheering for "teams" as I think you get the kind of situation we have ourselves in now - with people screeching about whether people working at Wal Mart are living high on the hog while the whole world burns to the ground.
I'm not a fan of most people in Congress - Democrat or Republican. Russ Feingold springs to mind as somebody principled. The rest? Not so much.
But I do recognize that the ideas being espoused here are straight out of the craziest dorm rooms of the University of Chicago and they're dangerous. What's more, Republicans have adopted these ideas and tried them on the US for the past 30 years.
Here we are folks. Happy?
Maybe its time you all stepped back from market fundamentalism, took a good look at what's going on around you and took pause. I mean you won't, that's clear, but you really really should.
"And no, I don't think they should be paid $15 an hour. I'm talking about basic dignity things like "stop working us 31 hours every week because you'd have to give us benefits if it was 32". "
How about getting rid of mandated benefits all together? I would rather have the freedom to negotiate my own benefits or work as many hours as I can than have the government mandate it from above. That is a good example of how government mandated benefits hurt people. You would think that mandating benefits for everyone who works full time is a great idea right? Well not exactly because what happens is the situation you describe. Well then maybe we should mandate benefits for everyone full and part time. Then they just don't hire as many workers and some people are out of a job. There are no easy answers.
As far as COSCO versus Wall Mart, if COSCO pays better, then they will attract better employees and have a better store. I am sorry but I don't think the owners of COSCO are any more virtuous than the Waltons. They just think paying workers a higher wage is worth it. Maybe they are right. If they are, they will do better than Wall Mart.
Maybe its time you all stepped back from market fundamentalism, took a good look at what's going on around you and took pause. I mean you won't, that's clear, but you really really should.
Right. So we should reconsider our beliefs about unionization because the UAW has been such a stunning success?
Like I said, where you imagine you get all this credibility from? It's one thing to say our idealism has failed. It's another to substitute your own failed idealism as the obvious replacement.
"Why aren't they happy? Because other people have better stuff.
Cry me a river."
Are the people who feigned ignorance at the ugly elitist strain on this blog still around? Because I think we've found the Rosetta stone of elitist asshole to which I've been referring.
"Maybe its time you all stepped back from market fundamentalism, took a good look at what's going on around you and took pause. I mean you won't, that's clear, but you really really should."
When have we ever had market fundementalism? I don't see any. What I see is a credit market that was propped up by easy money and crooked Congressmen who wanted to give loans to anyone and everyone regardless of whether they could pay it back. I see a home owning middle class that was convinced that their homes should double in value every five years and was demanding that Washington make it so. I see a degernate Wall Street culture that was addicted to the idea that you could get something for nothing and if things didn't work out you could always run to Washington to make things better because after all you were too big to fail.
In short, I don't see any market fundementalism. What I see is a society whereby government has gotten so strong that the politically powerful and connected can get it to spend trillions to make up for thier mistakes at the expense of every honest person in the country. Whatever is wrong with this country, it is not market fundementalism.
@ Glorious
I think you're confusing advocating for a small portion of stimulus funds to be directed towards those who could actually use them (UAW) versus those who clearly do not need them (bonused Wall Street CEO's) as some sort of tacit approval of auto unions.
Its not
If I have to pick a side between John Thain and the UAW though - its not really a contest. I know who does far more harm to this country.
Adam, I'm afraid they're right--the average family in 1950 not only lived near today's poverty line in inflation-adjusted terms, they consumed vastly less than a current poor family in terms of things like clothes, cars, home appliances, etc.
The reason people could live on less then was first, that female home labor compensated for a great deal of market labor, and second, that they just consumed less. The percentage of American household income expended on virtually every category except leisure, education and healthcare has actually fallen, even as the absolute amount we consume has risen dramatically. New homes are almost twice the size they used to be, the average woman has three or more times as many clothes, people travel vastly more than they used to, they eat out many more times and spend a great deal more on prepared foods, children have more toys . . . the list goes on and on.
You can say that this means that the Wal-Mart wage isn't really as good, because education and healthcare are important---but it's largely stuff that wasn't in the average budget fifty years ago, either because it didn't exist (healthcare treatments--the ones that were available in 1950 are now almost all very affordable, except for the female labor component) or the majority of people didn't include it (college).
@ Glorious
I think you're confusing advocating for a small portion of stimulus funds to be directed towards those who could actually use them (UAW) versus those who clearly do not need them (bonused Wall Street CEO's) as some sort of tacit approval of auto unions.
Its not
If I have to pick a side between John Thain and the UAW though - its not really a contest. I know who does far more harm to this country.
"How about getting rid of mandated benefits all together?"
I'm not inherently opposed to the idea. I'm young and healthy and could take home more if I had lesser health insurance. But it comes down to whether you think people have a right to a reasonable amount of medical care. If you don't, then there's nothing to talk about, we're too far apart. If you do, then assuming the current healthcare system exists, you'd have to pay people the equivalent of $7+benefits as the new minimum wage. Which is what, $11 or so? That's fine. But in a world where $7 an hour is not a reasonable amount to live on, especially with no benefits, something has to change.
"I am sorry but I don't think the owners of COSCO are any more virtuous than the Waltons. They just think paying workers a higher wage is worth it. Maybe they are right. If they are, they will do better than Wall Mart."
I don't think you get it. Paying their workers a higher wage is what makes them more virtuous. Owning a company and not making every decision with the sole purpose of "doing better" (ie maximizing your profit) makes them more virtuous. The Waltons have hundreds of billions of dollars they made by compensating their employees as little as they possibly could. They're not doing anything virtuous with that money. It could have gone to help make things better in the country, like Costco did with its potential profits.
I'd be surprised if the average WalMart worker got $7 an hour -- the federal minimum is currently $6.55, and it will be above $7 beginning this summer
Here's a nice undercover look at Wal-Mart and the working conditions there.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/02072009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/fly_on_the_wal_154007.htm?page=0
Additionally, Wal-Mart employees have high job satisfaction because they have an unusual degree of decision-making power.
That could be it. Or they might be unhappy because they don't know how they're going to pay the bills next month. Or because their car is on its last legs and they can't afford to get to work once it goes. Or because they don't have health insurance and can't afford braces for their kid. Or because they know they'll never be able to retire.
If they don't know how to deal with those issues on 50k a year, than no amount of government assistance is ever going to help them.
Adam, you're arguing from a clear slate here. You agreeably argue that we ought to consider enforcing securer safety nets for people whose job pays them less than the poverty rate. This is a reasonable proposition, although one
Mike M, well, Mike M very disagreeably argues that 50k a year isn't enough. That isn't a safety net, that's avarice. When the wage he complains is inadequate is larger than what the majority of the country makes it's hard to sanely respond to him.
The reason he does this is because he's simply a shill for the UAW. He's not arguing from a blank slate, he's arguing to promote the interests of the UAW to the exclusion of all others. The point that his policies will not work because, ipso facto, they haven't worked is completely lost on him.
He's too busy accusing everyone of failed policies while promoting his own.
Megan,
Thanks for the reply. My point wasn't that things haven't gotten better since the 50s, my point was that Dave tried to compare the average factory worker in the 50s with the WalMart worker of today, and I don't think the comparison holds.
"New homes are almost twice the size they used to be, the average woman has three or more times as many clothes, people travel vastly more than they used to, they eat out many more times"
This is all true. But WalMart employees don't own a house, and very likely never could working there. They virtually never buy any clothes at all or eat out at all, because they have a subsistence level wage and are struggling just to survive (which is why so many of them are on food stamps). Their economic situation is significantly worse than your average blue-collar worker in the 50s.
"Whatever is wrong with this country, it is not market fundementalism."
What were we told when we asked for more stringent regulations of industry in the wake of Enron? That it would hinder the markets. Instead we got Sarbanes/Oxley - a boon to the accounting industry that should have prevented the mess in the first place.
What were we told when jobs started leaving the US and going to places like India? That's the world market economy at work.
Whenever anybody protested what's been going on about mortgage lending or investment banking regulation or CEO pay we were told about "market forces".
I could go on and on and on all afternoon. You say "a government run amock" as if the free market ideologues weren't running the shop for the last eight years unchecked.
Reality check - there are no magical market forces. They don't exist. There's just human nature at work and people taking advantage.
Mike M,
Yes, yes, I'm an elitist asshole for expecting people to work hard and learn marketable skills if they want the nice stuff other people have.
When you're done with the crying and the Two Minutes Hate, maybe you can make some rational arguments.
TallDave,
"The company states that its regular full-time hourly associates in the US average $10.86 per hour"
Yeah, I bet the company says that. Why don't you go to your nearest one in a rural community and ask the employees if they make that much? See how many of them laugh in your face. The 10% store discount means that many of them are forced to do all their shopping there, which provides a strong disincentive to quit because their shopping would go up 10%. It's the welfare state of the corporate world.
"Additionally, Wal-Mart employees have high job satisfaction because they have an unusual degree of decision-making power."
This is utterly hilarious. As I said, I've worked there. You watch anti-union videos, are told that any talk of forming a union will get you fired, and if you're successful in doing so the store will immediately be closed. Many employees are asked to work overtime off the clock at least once a week, with an immediate firing if they refuse.
Pray tell, what decisions exactly do they have the unusual power to make? Quit and try again in another city?
What a bunch of moronic comments. Sorry MM, your blog deserves better than this. Where do these people come from?
Adam writes: "Nobody who works a full-time job should have to be on government assistance."
I agree with this. Anything else amounts to de-facto corporate welfare.
Dave tried to compare the average factory worker in the 50s with the WalMart worker of today, and I don't think the comparison holds.
The modern Wal-Mart employee is much better off.
But WalMart employees don't own a house, and very likely never could working there.
They can certainly afford the 1950s equivalent. Anyways, if you rented instead of buying in the last couple years, you're probably pretty dammed happy about it.
They virtually never buy any clothes at all or eat out at all
I'm fairly certain Wal-Mart employees are not naked (have you noticed how cheap clothes are at Wal-Mart?) and can afford to eat out at fast-food restaurants.
I think you're confusing advocating for a small portion of stimulus funds to be directed towards those who could actually use them (UAW) versus those who clearly do not need them (bonused Wall Street CEO's) as some sort of tacit approval of auto unions.
Please. I remember you, in your eyes the UAW could do no wrong. You spent more than one post denouncing ugly class warfare against the unions as the only possibility for why people opposed their bailout.
Feel free, however, to start arguing that, in the absence of the TARP, that the automakers shouldn't be bailed out. I doubt you will. You'll like stick with the wonderful argumentative logic that two wrongs make a right.
The fact that you argued, in this thread no less, that 50k is insufficient for anything more than a "backbreaking" and "soulcrushing" existence only further illustrates your obvious partisanship. That's more than what the majority of workers in this country make.
It is, however, just a little bit below the base wage of the UAW. This, I think, is not a coincidence.
"What a bunch of moronic comments. Sorry MM, your blog deserves better than this. Where do these people come from?"
So clearly the sollution is to ad another one.
"They can certainly afford the 1950s equivalent. Anyways, if you rented instead of buying in the last couple years, you're probably pretty dammed happy about it."
The 1950s equivalent is what, an 800 sq ft house? That still goes for around $70-80k where I live. Good luck getting a loan on that on $7 an hour. As for renting now, yes, but the point was that not only can they not afford a house they have no foreseeable future in which they could. A 1950s blue-collar worker could certainly provide for his family off one salary and own a small house.
"I'm fairly certain Wal-Mart employees are not naked (have you noticed how cheap clothes are at Wal-Mart?) and can afford to eat out at fast-food restaurants."
In other words, you can live in a trailer, wear WalMart's cheap chinese clothing, and eat the occasional McDonald's. At least until you have any medical expenses. And you see absolutely nothing wrong with many millions of people having this lifestyle in the most productive country on earth.
Pray tell, what decisions exactly do they have the unusual power to make
Sigh, I can tell you didn't read Platt's article.
You watch anti-union videos, are told that any talk of forming a union will get you fired
My God, the horror! I've never been allowed unionize either, and was often asked to work overtime. I didn't realize how oppressed I was till just now.
"What were we told when we asked for more stringent regulations of industry in the wake of Enron? That it would hinder the markets. Instead we got Sarbanes/Oxley - a boon to the accounting industry that should have prevented the mess in the first place."
The real estate mortgage industry is the most regulated in the economy. How is that a failure in the mortgage industry can be the result of "lack of regulations"? The regulations are only as good as the regulators. When the regulated community can go buy off people like Dodd and Franks, your regulations are no good. The entire crisis is the result of bad regulation.
Why did so many people by MBSes? Because they were told by the rating companies they were good. Why did they trust the rating companies? Because they are regulated and have the government stamp of approval. Why did banks make so many stupid loans? Two reasons. First they were being mao maoed by peopel in Congress to make stupid loans. Second and most importantly, they knew they could sell the loans no matter how shady to FREDDIE AND FANNIE. The Feds regulated so much that they created a false sense of security in people that piles of crap were, because they were regulated and gaurneteed by the government were somehow not crap.
This crisis is the result of too much regulation not too little. You need to be honest about what happned instead of just screaming how bad the market is. The market couldn't correct itself until it was too late because the government wouldn't let it correct itself for a variety of reasons.
In other words, you can live in a trailer, wear WalMart's cheap chinese clothing, and eat the occasional McDonald's.
Yep, that's about the average lifestyle of the 1950s. Except there's a lot more whining about it now, because other people with marketable skills have nicer stuff.
Yeah, I bet the company says that. Why don't you go to your nearest one in a rural community and ask the employees if they make that much?
So they should pay the same base wage in every market, regardless of prevailing labor conditions?
You may express incredulity at their figures, but by distinguishing between rural communities versus other communities in your anecdote you've just provided a very reasonable explanation for it.
This is utterly hilarious. As I said, I've worked there
The plural of anecdote is not data.
Pray tell, what decisions exactly do they have the unusual power to make? Quit and try again in another city?
So now Walmart is responsible for the economic conditions of its store's locations? If you say there is no other job available for these workers, you ought to be commending Walmart for hiring them in the first place.
And before you start in with the "Walmart destroys local retailers," the fact that Walmart is almost always deluged with job applications prior to opening their stories would indicate that there was a substantial labor pool available to begin with, and thus the local conditions are not their fault.
At any rate, the notion that these other, allegedly displaced, local retailers are somehow more virtuous in their labor practices than Walmart is specious. If anything, they're less accountable for their labor practices because they aren't part of a national chain that's constantly criticized, observed and a fat target for AGs and other lawyers.
For me to believe that smaller, less accountable, institutions are more "justly" run not only flies in the face of my personal experience but also the general theoretical model for how people behave.
And you see absolutely nothing wrong with many millions of people having this lifestyle in the most productive country on earth.
The majority of these in our neck of the woods have earned this high reward by crossing a lifeless desert on foot, or performing similar feats of strength. What is exactly that magic fix you propose?
TallDave,
You're right, I didn't read the article. But I will debunk the passage for you.
"All of us were given access to this information, because - in theory, at least - anyone in the store could order a couple extra pallets of anything, and could discount it heavily as a Volume Producing Item (known as a VPI), competing with other departments to rack up the most profitable sales each month."
In other words, you have a scanner you can use to see the item information. People below management in the store can't actually decide to order extra of something. Note the "in theory" caveat there that some spokesman threw in. You'd get immediately fired if you did that. Supply is tightly regulated, usually by the distribution center, not the store.
Same goes for discounting items heavily. Yeah, try discounting an item on your own, see if you last more than 10 minutes after a manager finds out about it. This is all just corporate crap to make things sound better. You have the exact same decision-making power as any other retail job: to quit or stay. Which isn't inherently bad. Just don't go making up good things about the job that don't actually exist.
"My God, the horror! I've never been allowed unionize either, and was often asked to work overtime. I didn't realize how oppressed I was till just now."
Which isn't really a problem, because you presumably get a decent salary and decent benefits. I don't care that Costco and other good retail places aren't unionized because they don't need to be: their workers are treated with a modicum of respect. It's when you treat your workers very poorly and prevent any way of correcting that treatment that's a problem.
Adam,
A blue collar worker of 1950 is equivalent to a "office park dad" of today. The equivalent of a walmart worker today is probably a sharecropper from the 1950's. You need to compare apples to apples.
"Reality check - there are no magical market forces. They don't exist. There's just human nature at work and people taking advantage."
Amongst the various funny things Mike M has posted, this is the best. It's like saying "There is no sky, just all that air and stuff floating around up there."
Glorious,
"by distinguishing between rural communities versus other communities in your anecdote you've just provided a very reasonable explanation for it."
My point was that Dave was using the $10.56 figure, which I imagine includes lower management, as an indication they pay a decent living wage. They don't. It's not really even close.
"The plural of anecdote is not data."
Maybe not. But it's a lot closer to the definition than "stuff a WalMart corporate spokesman says in a fluff article designed to make them look good".
"So now Walmart is responsible for the economic conditions of its store's locations? If you say there is no other job available for these workers, you ought to be commending Walmart for hiring them in the first place."
I'm not one of the "omg WalMart destroys communities" people. Like I said, I shop there regularly. That being said, it is often the case that many local specialty retailers close after a WalMart opens up. If you don't like the labor practices at one local retailers, you can get a job at another. Once there's one game in town, you're stuck with what they offer. Which is why they can do some of the practices they do. Where else are you going to go once everything else closes? So it's fine that they're a better business than what they replace. It's not fine that they can abuse that because of lax labor regulations. And yes, taking 5+ years for a judgment after a complaint is filed does tend to make them rather immune.
jmo writes: "A blue collar worker of 1950 is equivalent to a "office park dad" of today. The equivalent of a walmart worker today is probably a sharecropper from the 1950's. You need to compare apples to apples."
Who do we have to thank for that? The labor movement? Free trade? Globalization? Technological advances? Foreign investment? Government programs? Capitalism?
The 1950s equivalent is what, an 800 sq ft house? That still goes for around $70-80k where I live.
How much sq ft do you think a single-wide trailer provides? I didn't, so I looked.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_home
A single-wide trailer can be up to 18ft x 90ft. That constitutes 1620 sq. ft.
And if you see the kind of housing available in the 1950s to workers (I can see a lot, as I work in a old steel mill surrounded by a decaying city), it's not much different when it comes to quality. Probably better, actually.
jmo,
"A blue collar worker of 1950 is equivalent to a "office park dad" of today. The equivalent of a walmart worker today is probably a sharecropper from the 1950's. You need to compare apples to apples."
You're correct in saying that. My point is that overall productivity has gained tremendously in the past 50 years, and just because we had an underclass living in poor conditions then doesn't mean things should always be that way, when the country is so much more wealthy and productive.
And besides, you're the only one who even said that. Everyone else (including Megan) are making the WalMart/blue-collar comparison, which is clearly not accurate. And my point was that in the 1950s, people with a high school degree (or less) with no job skills could get a blue-collar job and a decent lifestyle. Now, they work at WalMart, because there aren't nearly enough of those types of jobs anymore.
Glorious,
"A single-wide trailer can be up to 18ft x 90ft. That constitutes 1620 sq. ft.
And if you see the kind of housing available in the 1950s to workers (I can see a lot, as I work in a old steel mill surrounded by a decaying city), it's not much different when it comes to quality. Probably better, actually."
Ok, fair enough, though I think on average they're much smaller than that (the one in the picture is 720). It's still difficult for someone on $7 an hour to afford one, and a mobile home park is a really substandard place to live and especially to raise kids. I'd say significantly worse than your suburban neighborhoods of small houses from the 50s. You generally don't own the land, either.
"This crisis is the result of too much regulation not too little."
Are you serious? I worked for the largest CMBS manufacturer in the US. "Regulation" consisted of approval and review from the rating agencies - they were asleep at the wheel. It was the most wild west atmosphere I've encountered in corporate America, and I was in on the dot com bust ten years earlier.
There was no regulation of note I assure you. While the RMBS market is a far bigger culprit in causing the spiraling disaster that ensued, everybody was along for the ride.
This is what I refer to when I say market fundamentalism. No recognition that "market forces" didn't have the beneficial effect they're supposed to produce. Just calls for more of the same.
Or to put it in Sesame Street terms for others - the air and sky are noxious, what you're calling air is exhaust and cannot be breathed by those who don't want adverse effects.
And my point was that in the 1950s, people with a high school degree (or less) with no job skills could get a blue-collar job and a decent lifestyle.
Are you saying that a "decent" lifestyle is truly unavailable to today's HS grads? That's like 3/4 of the population you're talking about. In addition, somebody with "no skills" is probably also someone with no dependents just starting out.
Unlike some, I think the question of what the left half of the bell curve is going to do with its time is an important one. But I think you are exaggerating here by conflating probies at WalMart (which may be a lousy place to work) with the entire non-bachelor's job market.
Adam,
We will always have an underclass living in, what are considered, poor conditions. If the median was the Palace of Versailles then someone living in the equivalent of the White House would be considered desperately poor.
And when the underclass is largely composed of recent [and illegal, to boot] immigrants, the situation is even more interesting.
Glorious writes: "And if you see the kind of housing available in the 1950s to workers (I can see a lot, as I work in a old steel mill surrounded by a decaying city), it's not much different when it comes to quality. Probably better, actually."
Square footage isn't everything.
I'm not sure where exactly you work, but in Pittsburgh, the housing stock built for the laborers is subjectively far better than a single-wide. I should know, I'm living in such a house currently. It has the classic shower in the basement that workers would use to clean off the soot before going upstairs. The living area is only 964 square feet, but that's not including a basement and the front and backyards. It was built in 1953, and, if I were to buy it, I'd probably expect to pay around $150,000. So, I guess that analogy comparing blue collar workers of the 50's to office park types today is spot-on.
"We will always have an underclass living in, what are considered, poor conditions. If the median was the Palace of Versailles then someone living in the equivalent of the White House would be considered desperately poor."
That's fine. Once we get to the point where there aren't any kids that don't get enough to eat and everyone can get decent medical care, I think the underclass will be a lot happier, as will I. I agree with TallDave that if someone isn't happy because they don't have as nice things as some others that worked harder, I have a hard time feeling too sorry for them. But let's not pretend most unhappy people are in that situation right now.
"Are you saying that a "decent" lifestyle is truly unavailable to today's HS grads? That's like 3/4 of the population you're talking about. In addition, somebody with "no skills" is probably also someone with no dependents just starting out."
I didn't say it's unavailable. There's always the military. I said it's harder than it used to be, especially in rural areas without a lot of job opportunities.
"But I think you are exaggerating here by conflating probies at WalMart (which may be a lousy place to work) with the entire non-bachelor's job market."
I may have been exaggerating some. But the non-bachelor's job market is really somewhat bad right now, and there are a decent amount of rural towns/cities where WalMart is in fact the only or one of very few places offering non-bachelor's jobs. So when the only job you can get doesn't even get you off food stamps, I think it's an issue.
Ok, fair enough, though I think on average they're much smaller than that (the one in the picture is 720). It's still difficult for someone on $7 an hour to afford one, and a mobile home park is a really substandard place to live and especially to raise kids. I'd say significantly worse than your suburban neighborhoods of small houses from the 50s. You generally don't own the land, either.
Most of the blue collar mill workers in the 50s, with "good" unionized jobs, lived in houses of around that size. That's true here in Braddock, where I can see scores of tiny houses all cramped together just waiting to be bulldozed.
It was true in Levittown PA, which was more or less built to house the workers for the Fairless Works and GM in the early 50s. Those were, to my recollection, standard 800sq ft models.
Perhaps the social conditions were better in the 1950s, but that probably had a lot more to do with society's prevailing social mores and is arguable anyway. At any rate, a mill town is hardly the best place to raise a family and untold commentators have spent decades decrying the mindless conformity and soullessness of Levittown anyway.
I suppose "owning the land" has some advantages, but that's because it's seen as an asset. In that case, the difference between owning land versus owning a building is not quite as clear.
I suppose land is more likely to appreciate, but as more than a few fixed income steelworker retirees can tell you, that also comes with its own difficulties. They're stuck in houses they own trying to pay rising property taxes they can't afford.
Also, in Braddock's case, the land is worthless anyway. The steelworker who got a 30 year mortage in 1950 would have very little equity to show for it even in 1980, and essentially none now.
"Are you serious? I worked for the largest CMBS manufacturer in the US. "Regulation" consisted of approval and review from the rating agencies - they were asleep at the wheel."
Exactly and are the rating agencies not regulated? Why weren't any of the regulators looking into the rating companies? Because the regulators and Congress were bought and paid for by the regulated communities. You have this child like faith in regulation. You assume that regulators are somehow immune from corruption and incompetence when all the evidence is otherwise. The problem was that people assumed that the stuff was good because the rating companies said so. That created a false sense of security and caused people to buy and sell crap. If anything the regualtion made things worse. Had there been no regulation, people would have not trusted the rating companies so much and would have looked for themselves.
everyone can get decent medical care
You pick the standard of care that constitutes "decent," and we can talk.
We could easily give everyone 1950's medical care at minimal cost. We could probably bring it up to 1980's at very slightly less than minimal cost. Some treatments (orthopedic surgery, ulcers) have actually gone down in difficulty and expense. But all the way to 2009 medicine, and it's going to be expensive.
I'm not sure where exactly you work, but in Pittsburgh, the housing stock built for the laborers is subjectively far better than a single-wide.
I work at Edgar Thomson. Wave to me the next time you're waiting in traffic on the Rankin or George Westinghouse bridges.
Come on down to Braddock, or even Homestead/Munhall and parts of Duquesne and I'll give you a tour. You're running out of time though, they're tearing them down left and right.
There are plenty of parts of Pittsburgh that are far nicer, but most of them existed for workers in better tiers or supervisory positions. From what I read, the average "laborer" of the 1950s wasn't usually living in them.
Glorious writes: "That's true here in Braddock, where I can see scores of tiny houses all cramped together just waiting to be bulldozed."
Braddock, Swissvale, Rankin, Hazelwood and Homestead have definitely gone downhill, no doubt about that. The houses themselves weren't bad, but the communities are rough now, and it makes little sense to invest in what is now a borderline ghetto.
Contrast those homes to the ones in stable communities like South Side, Morningside, and Greenfield (near where I live) that have actually held their value, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to make a convincing argument that a living in a trailer would be equally attractive.
"I suppose "owning the land" has some advantages, but that's because it's seen as an asset. In that case, the difference between owning land versus owning a building is not quite as clear."
Sorry, what I meant by that was that in a mobile home park you generally rent the land, sometimes on an at-will basis, so you can be asked to leave at any time (these parks are bought up and made into subdivisions/strip malls occasionally). They do this because they don't have the credit/background check levels to meet that apartments do, since their renters are more likely to have problems there.
"We could probably bring it up to 1980's at very slightly less than minimal cost."
That would be a pretty good idea. That would improve a lot of people's lives without being horrible on the budget, and proper preventative care saves a ton of money later on when they end up not needing the free expensive emergency care.
I see Rob has escaped the mental cage I built for him. Back to the psychiatrist for me.
Adam,
"Once we get to the point where there aren't any kids that don't get enough to eat and everyone can get decent medical care, I think the underclass will be a lot happier, as will I. "
No, I really don't think you will. You may say that now but in 15 years when you will need a computer to access any number of government services - maybe even voting - you will think that the poor need to be provided government issued computers. For, how can someone find a job or vote if they don't have a computer?
Think I'm wrong - they now have a program to provide the poor and elderly with free pre-paid cell phones.
https://www.safelinkwireless.com/EnrollmentPublic/home.aspx
Gee, if I throw a word like "exogenous" in there every now and again, will The Atlanic make me an economics correspondent? Looks like it!
(First off, I should have said "more than minimal cost.")
That would be a pretty good idea.
And here's where my trial-lawyer side kicks in. Doctors must live up to the applicable standard of care or 1) get sued for malpractice and 2) risk losing their licenses. 1980's medicine does not live up to the 2009 standard of care.
Quite apart from that, no doctor wants to just let someone die (or suffer) when treatment (even if expensive) is available. And no person wants to tolerate less than up-to-the-minute care without going on the Today Show and whining about how the mean government refuses to pay for their cures.
Universal, single payer 1980's health care would be a great thing at low cost, but I don't think it's possible.
""We could probably bring it up to 1980's at very slightly less than minimal cost."
That would be a pretty good idea. "
You would never agree to that. Did AIDS exist in 1980? Yes. Where there any drugs to treat it? No.
What was the survival rate for leukemia, colon cancer, breast cancer in 1980? Would you ever agree to only give the poor those treatments that existed in 1980, what about 1990 or 2000?
John, Yes, I've been in WalMart. I have family and friends that work there; I live 30 minutes from 3, and the largest in the land is less then an hour from my home.
I've written extensively about it's impact on local small business and Main St.
More importantly, Wal-Mart wages/benefits are a great picture of the service-sector lifestyle, the backbone employment in my home state, Maine, also known as Vacationland.
The best jobs at Wal-Mart are in the warehouse; folks there earn a better wage and get to work enough hours to earn health insurance. But nationally, the most jobs are in the stores.
And thanks for the name. I like being elite. It means I don't have to shop there, and I don't with one exception: cat litter.
"You would never agree to that."
Really? I'm pretty sure I'd agree to any possible program that expanded the number of people with any coverage whatsoever. I'd complain that maybe it should be bigger, perhaps, but I'd still want to see it passed.
I went two years without being able to afford a root canal. There are a lot more people who have situations like that than there are who have leukemia or AIDS or cancer. So help them first, then when the economy recovers we'll see about the rest.
And put malpractice protections in there for Rob.
Glorious writes: "From what I read, the average "laborer" of the 1950s wasn't usually living in them."
My grandfather began to work for PPG cutting glass after he served in WWII. He kept that job until he retired. I think it's fair to say he was an average laborer, but he was a member of the union. He lived with my grandmother, my mom, and my aunt in a modest duplex he rented in Mt. Washington; I would guess that it was 600 square feet at most.
My mom describes her upbringing as "working poor". Their weren't any luxuries besides a television, and my grandparents did not own a car. Food would be considered peasant food by our standards; I enjoyed many fried bologna sandwiches there as a kid. Still, he was able to retire with a pension and left a small amount of money when he passed (like $50k in the early 90's).
There's no way he could have afforded to buy my smallish house in Squirrel Hill, so I guess you may have a point. Still, having the ability to retire with a pension is pretty nice compared to working until you're 62 at Wal-mart and then scraping by on social security.
"I've written extensively about it's impact on local small business and Main St."
Having lived in a small town and worked at several of those "main street businesses" you are so fond of, I say you are full of crap. Those "main street business" jobs stunk. Few people on earth or cheaper or treat their employees worse than your typical small town business man. Further, those stores lost out to wall mart because they generally charged 6 to 10% more than Wall Mart and had horrible selection. Life in small towns before Wall Mart with all of those main street businesses was a lot harder than life after.
You are not an elite zic. You are just an uninformed provential with strange ideas about how other people actually live. You are less an elite than like some Victorian reading amazing tales about savages in the jungle. Only the modern provential liberal could sit around and whine about a store at which they don't work and don't shop.
"Only the modern provential liberal could sit around and whine about a store at which they don't work and don't shop."
Don't paint us all with that brush. As I've said, I've worked there and shop there regularly.
That being said, I'm headed out. Thanks for the thoughtful conversation guys, and for keeping it civil.
Good for you Adam. For the record I don't shop at Wall Mart, but I understand why people do and I would shop there if I lived in an area that didn't have a Target. Ultimately, I just hate it when someone demonizes a law abiding company and looks down their nose at people who shop there.
Thanks, John. Glad to have the record straight.
But the real point of this thread was on how to measure jobs and poverty. I tried to make the point that measures of poverty carry many other costs to consider when making those measurements, including health care, food stamps, education, and even carbon emissions; and that companies like Wal-Mart are subsidized because of these issues. Denying the importance of these measures doesn't improve our outcomes or budget.
I am really amazed at how many people commenting on this thread are from the Pittsburgh area. I had no idea.
"You assume that regulators are somehow immune from corruption and incompetence when all the evidence is otherwise. The problem was that people assumed that the stuff was good because the rating companies said so. That created a false sense of security and caused people to buy and sell crap. If anything the regualtion made things worse. Had there been no regulation, people would have not trusted the rating companies so much and would have looked for themselves."
Uh....no I knew exactly what was going on so I left (though its interesteing that you feel my assertion that regulators should do their jobs is "childish"). And I'm not sure how you can acknowledge all of this and then turn around and say we needed less regulation rather than regulation with teeth. The only reason people bought those securities was because they were supposedly vetted.
So if we had no regulation - what would have happened in this scenario according to your thinking? People wouldn't have bought these? They just wouldn't have existed? Or would even worse garbage have been funneled through and then sold through sheer hubris? Is that what you mean by people looking out for themselves - that we're at the mercy of any conman out there in the finance world? That's a pretty dystopian future. Good luck selling the dismantling of social security into the private realm with that viewpoint.
Look, there have always been people who could command a wage that could support a family, and people who could not.
In the old days, the people who could not were called women. And various other names related to skin color that I will not include here. That whole notion of earning a family wage with no specialized education or skills only applied to a subset of the population, and the organizations protecting their interests worked to keep it that way.
Nowadays, white men have no special protections. If they want to buy a house and raise a family, they need to learn a trade better than Walmart clerk. And they may need to move away from depressed rural economies.
The gain is that a lot of people who never had a shot at the good jobs in the past do have that shot now. White men are competing with everyone now, and they can't coast.
They are even competing with the entire populations of China and India. Terrifying thought, but you can't get around it.
The 50s were fake, so we can't really use them as our baseline. And even that fake only applied to some people.