On February 1, 2013, Neil Irwin writes on Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog in The Washington Post:
The economy began the year with solid job creation, and the labor market was much stronger at the end of 2012 than previously thought, according to new data out Friday that indicated surprising momentum in 2013.
Employers added 157,000 jobs in January, the Labor Department said, which was right in line with analyst expectations. The brightest news, though, was that revised estimates showed much higher job creation at the end of last year than first reported. The nation added a whopping 247,000 jobs in November and 196,000 in December, a combined 127,000 jobs above earlier estimates.
The January unemployment rate ticked up to 7.9 percent, from 7.8 percent, however, as both the number of people reporting having a job and the number looking for one edged up.
This is not near enough jobs to sustain the economy and every month their is the anticipation that the jobs report will disappoint, which it has for years now. Most Americans are not earning enough income to properly support themselves and their families. The country is experiencing a widening divide between an elite income class with well-paid salaries and dividend and capital gain income from stock ownership and low-pay wage earners and those dependent on taxpayer-supported government welfare funded by extracting taxes and incurring national debt.
This situation will continue to worsen. Americans need to WAKE UP and realize that the FUTURE is one of technological unemployment and underemployment. As private sector job creation continues to deteriorate most American incomes will decline, which will result in a downturn in the economy as there will be fewer and fewer “customers with money” to purchase the products and services society needs and wants. The result: no or significantly reduced opportunity for income.
In the past decade and previous to that Americans were increasingly relying on CONSUMER DEBT to finance homes, cars, vacations, education, and their material affluence. This is the worst debt because it does not generate its own income stream to pay for its self unlike applying the logic of corporate finance, which is self-financing and asset-backed credit for productive uses to grow the economy. People invest in capital ownership on the basis that the investment will pay for itself. Ordinary Americans are shut out of this opportunity because our financial institutions require a form of loan security and relay on “past” savings and equity, which ordinary Americans, and by that I mean the majority, do not have. What is need our proposals to free economic growth from the slavery of “past” savings.
The new reality of technological unemployment is not going to go away. This reality is the result of technological innovation and invention, tectonic shifts in the technologies of production, and an obsolete union movement stuck in job creation and “more pay for less work” instead of bargaining for employee ownership and increased incomes resulting from dividends earned as stock owners in corporate America.
We need REAL solutions, which combine JOBS CREATION and OWNERSHIP CREATION. There is a solution, which will result in double-digit economic growth and enable ordinary Americans to become affluent. The Just Third Way Master Plan for America’s future is published athttp://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797.
