The April jobs report came out today and again the news was good. The economy gained 244,000 jobs last month, with the private sector gaining 268,000 jobs and the public sector shedding 24,000. This has been the trend for some time now, with private sector job growth outpacing the overall jobs number because the public sector is shrinking. Although the March and April numbers are still preliminary, we've added 768,000 jobs in the first four months of 2011 and, leaving off January, we've gained 700,000 jobs in the last three months.
Although the unemployment rate rose to 9.0% from last month's rate of 8.8%, this is less important than job growth for reasons that I won't get into here since this is already going to be wonkish enough as it is. I will say, however, that the makeup of the unemployed has shifted, with far more people unemployed for less than five weeks and far fewer unemployed for more that twenty-seven weeks. This too is welcome news.
If the good news is that we're on the road to recovery, the bad news is that it's an extremely long road. Primarily because our population grows, we need to add more jobs to the workforce just to maintain the status quo. Specifically, we need to add at least 125,000 new jobs every month or 1.5 million every year, and that's a conservative estimate. Many economists use 150,000 a month or 1.8 million new jobs a year and, frankly, this higher number is historically sound. In the 1960s when the population was smaller, we added over 17 million jobs, and in the decades of the '70s, 80s and '90s we added over 18 million jobs in each. Over the forty years from 1960 through 1999, we added an average of about 160,000 jobs a month. Nevertheless, I'll use the 125,000 number. Now, let's look at the facts and do the math.
In the Great Recession we lost millions of jobs, but the periods before it and after it were also marked by anemic job growth, and we mustn't forget the 1.5 million jobs we need to add annually just to keep up. In the last 11 years, from May 2000 through April 2011, we should have added 16.5 million jobs, but over that period we actually lost 632,000 jobs, leaving us with a shortfall of more than 17.1 million jobs that we need to make up, over and above the 1.5 million per year we need to add going forward if we want to get back to where we were 11 years ago when Clinton was president.
If we add 225,000 jobs every month, that would mean 2.7 million a year. The only president to exceed that over his entire presidency was Bill Clinton, although, believe it or not, Jimmy Carter was closest with a rate of over 2.6 million for his whole presidency. I know Sean Hannity likes to say that we lost 10 million jobs under Carter, but once again he's wrong and we gained over 10 million jobs under Carter. LBJ also added well over 2 million jobs a year and Ronald Reagan, although falling short of 2 million a year for his entire tenure, did manage to do so for one of his two terms.
In any event, even if we can add jobs at a rate of 2.7 million a year over a sustained period of time, when you consider that 1.5 million of that is just to tread water, it won't be until September 2025 that we can get back to where things were in May 2000. That's a 25+ year long national nightmare. We need to focus on job creation or we'll condemn an entire generation of Americans to the eroded peace of mind that attends our woeful employment picture. I'm begging everyone to keep their eyes on the ball and ignore those who would use wedge issues to divide us and render us unable to solve our real problems.
Showing posts with label Sean Hannity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sean Hannity. Show all posts
Friday, May 6, 2011
Thursday, September 10, 2009
You Can't Fix Stupid...or Can You?
As football coaches are fond of saying, "You can't fix stupid." Until very recently I have labored under the presumption that these words are true. I'm only now beginning to question the wisdom of this maxim, and only because I think the very notion of stupidity may need to be examined more closely. Obviously, there is an important difference between ignorance and stupidity, but there may also be a critical distinction between different types of stupidity.
Ignorance is simply a lack of knowledge. Being unaware of something doesn't necessarily indict someone's intellect. I'm not smarter than Stephen Hawking because I know my Aunt Barbara's phone number and Dr. Hawking doesn't. Let's say you can't identify the color puce because it's a shade so esoteric that crayola never even included it in the giant box with the built-in sharpener. (You know you exist on the fringe when you're excluded while Burnt Sienna and Raw Umber get seats at the table). Seeing something puce identified as such will forever eliminate your ignorance. On the other hand, let's say you refuse to accept the idea that limes are green, even though you concede that they're the same color as grass and that grass is green. In that case, we have stupidity rather than ignorance because you have all the required facts but you lack the ability to process them.
Thus, conventional wisdom would argue that ignorance can be very easily erased while stupidity is an intractable problem. I want to challenge this to an extent by suggesting that there are two types of stupidity, one which conforms to this reasoning and one which doesn't. I'll call them Type A and Type B. Someone with Type A stupidity was born that way and pretty much all you can do is put a paper hat on him and wish him well. He's as incapable of sophisticated thought as I am of bench pressing 300 lbs. Type B stupidity is another matter altogether. This phenomenon occurs when fear, rage, hatred or any combination thereof hijacks and paralyzes a well-functioning brain, rendering it as feckless as that of a low-grade moron. This has been occurring lately with disturbing frequency.
Take the example of Sean Hannity and Frank Luntz shortly after President Obama's address to Congress. They talked about how the president called insurance executives bad people (about 4:05 remaining in the video clip for those checking the link) because he said, referring to a series of current problems with insurance, "Insurance executives don't do this because they're bad people; they do it because it's profitable." No one with an IQ above 75 would draw that conclusion from those words unless he or she was stricken with acute Type B stupidity. Unless we can retreat from the brink, this will become more commonplace as people, particularly from the right wing grow increasingly unhinged.
Here's the good news, we'll eventually regain our bearings and settle back into being a country that's not the embarrassment I'm watching on my television night after night. My entire point is that this temporary or Type B stupidity is easily curable. The moment one decides not to give into the madness, the demons are automatically exorcised and the mind regains it's full ability to function. You can fix (some forms of) stupid.
Ignorance is simply a lack of knowledge. Being unaware of something doesn't necessarily indict someone's intellect. I'm not smarter than Stephen Hawking because I know my Aunt Barbara's phone number and Dr. Hawking doesn't. Let's say you can't identify the color puce because it's a shade so esoteric that crayola never even included it in the giant box with the built-in sharpener. (You know you exist on the fringe when you're excluded while Burnt Sienna and Raw Umber get seats at the table). Seeing something puce identified as such will forever eliminate your ignorance. On the other hand, let's say you refuse to accept the idea that limes are green, even though you concede that they're the same color as grass and that grass is green. In that case, we have stupidity rather than ignorance because you have all the required facts but you lack the ability to process them.
Thus, conventional wisdom would argue that ignorance can be very easily erased while stupidity is an intractable problem. I want to challenge this to an extent by suggesting that there are two types of stupidity, one which conforms to this reasoning and one which doesn't. I'll call them Type A and Type B. Someone with Type A stupidity was born that way and pretty much all you can do is put a paper hat on him and wish him well. He's as incapable of sophisticated thought as I am of bench pressing 300 lbs. Type B stupidity is another matter altogether. This phenomenon occurs when fear, rage, hatred or any combination thereof hijacks and paralyzes a well-functioning brain, rendering it as feckless as that of a low-grade moron. This has been occurring lately with disturbing frequency.
Take the example of Sean Hannity and Frank Luntz shortly after President Obama's address to Congress. They talked about how the president called insurance executives bad people (about 4:05 remaining in the video clip for those checking the link) because he said, referring to a series of current problems with insurance, "Insurance executives don't do this because they're bad people; they do it because it's profitable." No one with an IQ above 75 would draw that conclusion from those words unless he or she was stricken with acute Type B stupidity. Unless we can retreat from the brink, this will become more commonplace as people, particularly from the right wing grow increasingly unhinged.
Here's the good news, we'll eventually regain our bearings and settle back into being a country that's not the embarrassment I'm watching on my television night after night. My entire point is that this temporary or Type B stupidity is easily curable. The moment one decides not to give into the madness, the demons are automatically exorcised and the mind regains it's full ability to function. You can fix (some forms of) stupid.
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