Politicians bickering over private equity’s impact on jobs and how to bring down the high unemployment rate are entirely missing the point about the crisis facing working Americans. The predicament we face isn’t simply that there are too few jobs; it’s also that an increasing number of workers don’t have the kind of job that can pay the bills.
Recent conventional wisdom holds that the president’s reelection chances may have slightly improved because the unemployment rate has inched down to 8.5%. But that is a deceptive number. The true unemployment rate is over 15% if you include what the Department of Labor calls “all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons.” In English, that translates into people who want to work but are not looking right now along with people who don’t have full-time work, many of whom would like to.
If you add those people to the people who have full-time work at or just above the minimum wage, at least 1 in 5 Americans — 30 million people — does not have a decent job. Which explains why, according to the Census Bureau, 46 million people — or about 15% of Americans — live in poverty, the highest percentage since 1993.
There is a serious discussion we need to have about American jobs that takes into account not just the quantity but also the quality. But that isn’t a conversation leaders of either party are interested in having.
We need to face up to the reality that the free-market economic principles that have been promoted for decades are an abject failure, at least if you measure success by whether people who work hard can support their families and make ends meet.
Gary Reber Comments: Sadly, the median household income is just over $49,000, while the annual median wage fell to just over $26,000, the lowest level since 1999. Unemployment is high and there is an accelerating displacement of labor workers by technology and cheaper foreign labor, resulting in greater economic uncertainty and unstable retirement incomes for the average American citizen––causing the average citizen to become increasingly dependent on government wealth redistribution programs. This is a downward trend that will not reverse itself because the productive sector exponentially advances job-displacing technology-based productive capital expansion. whose ownership is further concentrated among the rich minority.
We need to innovate in such ways that we lower the barriers to equal economic opportunity and create a level playing field based on anti-monopoly and anti-greed fairness and balance between production and consumption. The reform of the “system,” must be structured so that eventually all citizens produce an expanding proportion of their income through their privately owned productive capital and simultaneously generate consumer purchasing power.
