Brindle Media

Posts Tagged ‘unemployment’

“In the mid-1880s,…growth of colossal corporations in the aftermath of the Civil War had produced immense, consolidated wealth for business owners, but the lives of the working people…had become increasingly difficult.” In her book, The Bully Pulpit, Doris Kearns Goodwin quotes one of Teddy Roosevelt’s political rivals as observing: “We plow new fields, …open new mines,…found new cities…we add knowledge and utilize invention after invention. (Yet) it becomes no easier for the masses of our people to make a living. On the contrary, it is becoming harder.”

Sound familiar?

Although America’s unemployment rate has been dropping, long term unemployment remains a major issue. It’s estimated that over a million Baby Boomers are members of the long term unemployed cohort.

More than 15% percent of the approximately thirty-six million Baby Boomers born in the U.S. between 1946 and 1954 are expected to live active, healthy lives into their 90s. Since retirement savings for many of those Boomers were severely diminished during the recent financial crisis, many of them will need to continue working at jobs which are both psychically and financially rewarding well past the traditional 65 year old retirement age. Meanwhile, American businesses including the legal and medical professions are reducing their labor forces through the use of automation and robotics.

To remain a successful capitalist economy, America needs consumers for the goods and services it produces. Although many of American industries’ customers may come from outside of the United States, it will also be necessary for Americans to consume local goods and services. To do so, they will require sufficient incomes.

As columnist Tom Friedman points out, the US needs to rethink its social contracts because labor is important to a person’s identity and dignity as well as to societal stability.

For the country’s future well-being, political and business leaders need to focus not only on helping millennials who are entering the workforce but also on redeveloping the American economy to keep healthy Baby Boomers engaged in jobs which are both psychically and financially rewarding. The challenge will be to create opportunities to unite the natural resources of Boomer experience and expertise with the 21st century skill sets of Millennials.

Suggestions?

In his recent TIME essay , The History of the American Dream, Jon Meacham observes: “Strangely, it’s now possible for the French to be move socially and economically mobile than Americans”.

So much for the American capitalism vs. European socialism argument.

Meanwhile, in one of his recent columns, David Brooks writes about America: “Equal opportunity, once core to the nation’s identity, is now a tertiary concern.”

During the 1992 presidential campaign, James Carville and George Stephanopoulos came up with “It’s The Economy, Stupid” for Bill Clinton. Twenty years later, it’s the economy again. Or, for our more granular 21st century speak, “Jobs”.

The Washington Monthly’s summer issue focuses on the economic debate that our politicians aren’t having, the erosion of the average American family’s wealth and its relation to the country’s future success. In the information overload of our daily lives, it’s easy to respond to the bumper sticker language of campaigns and to forget that America doesn’t live in isolation from the rest of the world. More than ever, it’s a global economy and those in power are frequently not in a position to lead as much as to react.

Personally, I’ve been an advocate for a WPA-type of approach to getting the unemployed back to work while fixing the country’s neglected infrastructure. Rather than extending federal unemployment benefits, it would seem more logical to use those dollars to put people back to work doing something useful which not only helps the country but also provides those involved with a sense of purpose and pride.

However, as the Washington Monthly’s Paul Glastris and Phillip Longman point out: “With household asset levels so depleted, it’s folly to think that the economy can be set right merely by adding more jobs, however much they’re needed. That’s the lesson of the Great Depression and World War II. As James K. Galbraith has pointed out.., the New Deal built infrastructure and put Americans back to work, but failed to spark self-sustaining economic growth. It was ‘the war, an only the war that restored..the financial wealth of the American middle class.’.”

Hopefully, we won’t need to resort to another world war in order to get our financial house back in order. That’s not a solution that any of us wants to ponder. However, watching what’s been going on in Europe and in the Middle East shouldn’t make any of us feel too complacent.

So, if the U.S. is going to get back on track, all of us, you and me included, are going to have to urge our political leaders to focus on uniting rather dividing the country along ideological lines. In his TIME article, Jon Meacham writes: “We are stronger the wider we open our arms… Our dreams are more powerful when they are shared by others in our time and we are the only ones who can create a climate for the American Dream to survive another generation.”

As Aesop noted in one of his fables a long time ago, “United we stand. Divided we fall.”