For three years, Triana Williams has searched for a job. Between caring for her elderly grandmother and raising her young sister, the 24-year-old has filled out application after application at Ralphs,Rite Aid, Whole Foods, Ross, Payless and Starbucks.
She calls to follow up, but they wave her off, Williams said. “They tell me I need experience to get the job,” Williams said in her Venice apartment. “But you have to get a job to get experience.”
Teenagers and young adults are still mired in dire levels of unemployment in Los Angeles County, years after the recession officially ended. New estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau reveal that last year, the unemployment rate for Angelenos ages 20 to 24 had stagnated at 19%.
Joblessness was even higher for Angelenos between the ages of 16 and 19, with 41% of those in the labor force still unemployed, according to the new estimates from the American Community Survey. (People who aren’t looking for work, including many students, aren’t counted in the labor force.)
This deplorable situation will worsen as long as we as a nation fail to address the REAL problem at the root of income inequality and poverty––CONCENTRATED OWNERSHIP of wealth-creating, income-generating productive capital. And to advocate for solutions that systematically broaden private sector individual ownership of the formation of FUTURE productive capital investment to empower EVERY American to accumulate over time a viable capital trust (super-IRA) portfolio of stock in diversified companies and reap the full earnings payout of corporate earnings as dividend income to support their livelihood and retirement.
Without a policy shift to broaden productive capital ownership simultaneously with economic growth, further development of technology and globalization will undermine the American middle class and make it impossible for more than a minority of citizens to achieve middle-class status.
President Obama stated: “What’s at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.” As long as working people are limited by earning income solely through their labor worker wages, they will be left behind by the continued gravitation of economic bounty toward the top 1 percent of the people that the system is rigged to benefit. Working people and the middle class will continue to stagnate, resulting in a stagnated consumer economy. More troubling is that this continued stagnation will further dim the economic hopes of America’s youth, no matter what their education level. The result will have profound long-term consequences for the nation’s economic health and further limit equal earning opportunity and spread income inequality. As the need for labor decreases and the power and leverage of productive capital increases, the gap between labor workers and capital owners will increase, which will result in upheaval.
As we seek to eliminate human toil jobs by substituting non-humans means of production for human means and accomplish new feats that only technology can produce, the reality is that private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work will constantly be eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role.
Given the current invisible structure of the economy, except for a relative few, the majority of the population, no matter how well educated, will not be able to find a job that pays sufficient wages or salaries to support a family or prevent a lifestyle, which is gradually being crippled by near poverty or poverty earnings. Thus, education is not the panacea, though it is critical for our future societal development. And younger, as well as older people, will increasingly find it harder and harder to secure a well-paying job––for most, their ONLY source of income––and will find themselves dependent on taxpayer-supported government welfare, open and disguised or concealed.
While arguments point to measures that will benefit “educated” Americans, journalists and economists fail to address the necessity for broadened private sector individual ownership of FUTURE productive capital asset economic growth, connecting people with individual super-IRA-type Capital Homestead Accounts (CHPs) by which to build viable, sustainable diversified ownership portfolios in America’s corporations and future corporations, and to provide financial security in retirement.
See “Education Is Critical To Our Future Societal Development” at http://www.nationofchange.org/education-critical-our-future-societal-development-1373556479
See “Financing Economic Growth With ‘FUTURE SAVINGS’: Solutions To Protect America From Economic Decline” at NationOfChange.orghttp://www.nationofchange.org/
http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-0919-census-unemployment-20130919,0,3648261.story
